Dive Brief:
- Apple’s Beats became the first consumer brand with a Snapchat Sponsored Lens with its Black Friday campaign.
- The Sponsored Lens features special effects such as adding cartoon-like headphones over a users' ears in their images while a soundtrack of Drake’s "Big Rings" plays.
- "Through the Lens, Beats is giving Snapchatters the opportunity to engage and communicate with their brand in a personal and dynamic way," Snapchat said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Snapchat snagged its first consumer brand Sponsored Lens with a Black Friday campaign from Apple’s Beats. The lens filters launched in October and Snapchat sold the first sponsored lens to Twentieth Century Fox to promote “The Peanuts Movie” in early November. Snapchat claims that 10 million lenses are sent daily among its 100 million daily users.
About the Beats campaign, Snapchat said, “This campaign is very on-brand for Beats, who is powering the experience, but inviting talent, the talent’s fans, and their own fans to bring the Lens to life creatively.”
One digital media buying executive told Digiday, “Filters? That’s not how you build a billion-dollar business. But what they’re doing is different, and I applaud that. It is interesting.”
The comment echoes industry concerns about Snapchat as an advertising platform because the social media company has a lack of clear targeting and reporting capabilities that marketers find in other social platforms. At the same time marketers are intrigued with Snapchat’s demographics that heavily skew toward millennials and Gen Z.
