The social media giant Snapchat is launching a new advertising initiative, known as ‘Sponsored Lenses’, to be unveiled on Halloween. This development follows the introduction of the ‘Lenses’ feature, allowing users to add special effects to the pictures they share, and will seamlessly integrate within it.
According to the Financial Times, advertisers will be able to pay $750,000 for peak days or $450,000 for off-peak, for their own special effects to be available for users to utilise. Hollywood studios are thought to be among the first advertisers, which could see users be able to custom their snapchats with characters from upcoming films.
Sponsored lenses appear to be a refinement of Snapchat’s previous advertising method of ‘Brand Stories’, in an attempt to more effectively monetise their user base. Brand Stories, which was abandoned in April, allowed brands to market their products and services by sharing photo and video with users who did not follow them.
While sponsored lenses are similar in the sense that they blend in with users’ normal feed, the crucial difference lies in the fact that they encourage them to become active in the advertising process. This demonstrates the possibilities for more effectively targeting a particular demographic, in this case a young Snapchat user base, centred on the sharing of content with each other. Rather than simply displaying their brand, sponsored lenses allow marketers to let the Snapchat community distribute their message instead, thus avoiding a hard sell image.
Snapchat’s new approach emphasises the marked shift into the mobile age of marketing, where the need for increasingly creative and personalised approaches to capture consumers’ imaginations is becoming even greater.
E-commerce brands in particular could stand to gain a lot from this approach, as they seek to capitalise on the continuing growth of the sector as a whole, a fact underlined by the increasing ease for budding entrepreneurs to start their own online stores. Mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) specifically is growing significantly, with traffic from mobile channels having grown from just under 33% in Q2 2014 to 39% in Q2 2015. Although these figures also show that conversion rates were at 1.50% on smartphones compared to 4.68% on traditional platforms, the sheer number of consumers beginning to flock to m-commerce demonstrates the potential for more inventive advertising.
It remains to be seen to what extent the giants of e-commerce will take advantage of sponsored lenses on Snapchat. Yet, the possibility for marketers to turn their target market from consumers of their advertising efforts effectively into creators of it, is full of potential.
By Steve Holtz, freelancer content writer.
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