Brief:

• Domino's on July 28 ran a mobile campaign that let Snapchat users in the U.S. order food directly inside the image-messaging app. Snapchat's "shoppable AR," which mixes social commerce with augmented reality features, gave Domino's customers the opportunity to request a pizza after interacting with a branded lens, per Adweek.
• The AR lens worked with both the front and back cameras of a smartphone. Those who took a selfie saw their faces decorated with a virtual pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses that had a reflection of a pizza in the lenses. Flipping the camera around showed a virtual Domino's pizza box that opened to show a pepperoni pizza inside. From there, people could tap an on-screen button to request a delivery without ever leaving the app.
• Ad agency Kabaq helped to create the campaign by photographing pizza and turning the images into an AR feature. The agency this month created a similar Snapchat campaign for The Economist to showcase possible foods of the future.

Insight:

Domino's Snapchat campaign is a sign that the image-messaging app's social commerce features are gradually gaining traction among major brands. Snapchat introduced shopping AR in April with Adidas, beauty supplier Coty, gaming company King and STX Entertainment as launch partners. The technology lets advertisers create AR lenses with an on-screen button that can be programed to complete actions like pointing users to online stores or apps to browse and buy products.

Snapchat's shoppable AR features are part of the company's efforts to appeal to advertisers and demonstrate how lenses can fit into a broader marketing strategy. Since December, parent company Snap has introduced its Lens Studio to help brands create their own AR ads, offered free ad credits to advertisers that buy vertical video ads on Instagram and other rival platforms, added commerce features to appeal to social influencers and provided free analytics to brands to show how customers are more likely to visit a store after watching an ad.

Snap says that about 70 million people a day interact with an AR lens, spending an average of three minutes with the feature. Snapchat's sales team sells national AR ads, such as the one for Domino's, and highlights them in the camera as the first AR feature to appear. The cost is a flat fee of about $500,000 to reach 15 million to 20 million people while generating 40 million to 60 million impressions, according to Snap. The company also sells AR lenses on a self-serve basis, letting advertisers pay between $10 and $14 for 1,000 AR lens interactions with no minimum ad buy. The AR campaigns see an average sales lift of about 10%, according to a survey of 22 CPG brands by measurement company Nielsen Catalina shared with Adweek.

Domino's has been very active with its mobile campaigns and efforts to provider greater convenience to customers. The pizza chain this month expanded its number of hotspots — designated delivery locations like parks, sports fields and beaches that don't have a traditional address — to more than 200,000 after launching the program in April. Along with its Hotspots program, Domino's has pioneered other mobile-driven tech, launching its vaunted "pizza tracker" service in 2008 and testing self-driving delivery in Miami in a pilot program with Ford Motor and Postmates. The company has also upgraded its ordering system with a voice recognition feature powered by artificial intelligence to automate pizza orders made over the phone.