Media & Entertainment

Snapchat rolls out a trio of new ad products using its lenses and geofilters

Comment

In an effort to further differentiate itself from rival Facebook, Snapchat this morning expanded its ad offerings lineup with three new products that take advantage of its already popular lenses and geofilters. The company is debuting a handful of new products, including World Lenses, Audience Lenses, and Smart Geofilters – representing the largest update to its Sponsored Creative Tools since the first branded Lens debuted in October 2015.

The company says that its creative tools are heavily used in its app, which makes them appealing to potential advertisers. Today, over 1 in 3 daily users play with Lenses every day on average, Snapchat notes, and snaps with Geofilters are viewed over 1 billion times a day on average.

The newly introduced World Lenses are an extension on Snapchat’s Sponsored Lens, which already let advertisers turn users’ selfies into ads. With the Sponsored World Lenses, advertisers can also create content for the rest of the photo beyond the face, including floating 2D or 3D objects, interactive content, and other items.

There are four types of World Lenses becoming available: those where you can place a 2D or 3D film character or product into the photo (for those photos snapped with the outward-facing camera); action-based lenses where you look at or tap an AR object to trigger something to happen – like a cloud character vomiting rainbows, for example; an “interaction” World Lens, like an in-app game; and environmental lenses which can be used to add floating lights or ambiance.

Not all the iterations of World Lenses available at launch. For example, Snapchat does not yet offer support for the recently launched 3D objects in its World Lenses ads, and didn’t offer an ETA on when these would be available.

According to Snapchat, doubling down on its Sponsored Lenses makes sense because these types of lenses consistently see high engagement times among end users – or, as Snapchat calls it, “play time.” The company says that Snapchatters today play with these Sponsored Lenses for over 15 seconds before sending them.

Warner Bros. will be the first advertiser to run a Sponsored World Lens on Snapchat with a new ad for the joint MGM and WB film “Everything, Everything.” Others who have plans to run World Lens ads in the future include Netflix, for its show “Glow;” plus Dunkin Donuts and Glidden Paint.

The World Lenses will be available in all markets where Lenses are sold, including the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.

Additionally, Snapchat is rolling out Audience Lenses, which allow advertisers to buy regionally targeted Lenses for the first time. Before, advertisers could only be bought as nationwide takeovers, Snapchat says.

Audience Lenses let advertisers buy a guaranteed number of Lens impressions for a specific audience. This includes those that are targeted by demographics like age and gender, as well as those identified as falling in one of Snapchat’s “Lifestyle Categories” – a grouping that’s based on the user’s viewing habits in the Discover and Our Stories sections in the app.

Red Bull and MTV have already tested these Audience Lenses, and Lancome’s L’Oreal Paris will launch one soon.

The third new ad product is an updated version of Snapchat’s Geofilters. This ad type allows users to activate branded overlays that appear when they swipe left or right on the camera. Citing data from a survey it commissioned, Snapchat notes these Geofilters are already very popular with the Snapchat community, as 80 percent of users have used a Geofilter at a restaurant, 66 percent at a mall, and 50 percent at a gym, for example.

The new ad is called a Smart Geofilter, which will automatically add location information or other real-time information to a nationwide or chain Geofilter. For example, these could be updated automatically to include things like a high school or college name, airport name, state, city, neighborhood or zip code.

Warner Bros. again ran Smart Geofilter ads for its movie “Everything, Everything,” in order to target high school users by featuring the name of the school in its ad.

In addition to the rollout of new products, Snapchat says it has made other improvements to the way the ad business works – including sped up production timelines for Sponsored Lenses, which now only take six weeks instead of eight. It has also added quick-turn options that leverage its existing creative content from prior Lenses which only take one to three weeks.

Building out its interactive content helps Snapchat keep users engaged with its app, and launching it repeatedly – daily users launch it over 18 times per day, on average. Snapchat’s daily users now spend over 30 minutes on Snapchat each day on average, up from 25 to 30 minutes last quarter. More than 3 billion Snaps are created every day — up from more than 2.5 billion in Q3 2016. And over 60 percent of Snapchat’s daily users create content every day.

By extending the same set of engaging tools to advertisers, Snapchat hopes that advertisers see the value in the time users are spending with their ads, even if Snapchat doesn’t have Facebook’s reach.

More TechCrunch

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…

Ampere teams up with Qualcomm to launch an Arm-based AI server

At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…

Google I/O was an AI evolution, not a revolution

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…

Meet the Magnificent Six: A tour of the stages at Disrupt 2024

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…

Khosla Ventures, Pear VC triple down on Honey Homes, a smart way to hire a handyman

TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…

TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube

Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and use wireless 5G networks to…

Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveillance more widespread

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

Google is launching a Gemini add-on for educational institutes through Google Workspace.

Google adds Gemini to its Education suite

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…

CoLab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools