But amplify this idea to marketers, and mix in Snap’s more valuable selfie lenses, and all the businesses and creative agencies in the world can create their own custom advertisements, without having to go through collaborations with Snap’s own team. Though allowing users to make their own lenses could come with problems of its own. That brought plenty of controversy to the company for lenses that came off as pretty darn racist. To date, Snap’s own creative team has implemented every lens you see. By creating and sharing their own lenses, users will push their creations to go viral, all while filling Snap’s troughs with countless free, new attempts at the next big hit, like the aforementioned dancing hot dog that was viewed 1.5 billion times. Opening lenses up to the community increases the user’s stake in Snapchat’s most iconic feature. Snap declined to comment, but the strategy here isn’t all that difficult to deconstruct.
You’re provided a Snap Code (essentially a QR Code) that you can send to friends, or, when you use the lens yourself and share the video, other users will be able to tap the UI to adopt it themselves. Once you’ve created a lens, you can easily share it.
It’s an app that allows you to create, and even animate, 3D figures in whichever software you prefer to use like Blender or 3ds Max, then import that data so it can live and breathe inside Snapchat.
To open its platform, Snap has shared its own creative tools and repackaged them for anyone to download for free in a desktop app called Lens Studio. And so far, augmented reality filters seem like the most promising way in. Right now, social networks are racing to rule messaging-based ads. The announcement comes on the heels of Facebook launching a very similar initiative within Messenger. Taco Bell sponsored a Taco-head lens that was viewed 224 million times in a 24-hour period, as Snapchat users literally wore the Taco Bell brand as their face. Put simply, people like taking selfies, but even if they don’t record a video, the like to look at themselves through Snap’s silly augmented reality effects.
Rainbow puke aside, they can be both highly lucrative ads for Snap and seem to drive the majority of user engagement across lens types.
But there’s a catch: While anyone can make a “ World Lens” object, which is an augmented reality thing that floats inside your video frame, only marketers will be able to make Snapchat’s real pièce de résistance, the selfie lenses.