Fast Forward: Snapchat Doubles Down on Shoppable AR & Creator Tools
Here’s everything brands should know about Snap’s latest announcements and its platform ambition
Editor’s note: This is an abridged edition of our Fast Forward newsletter. For the full version, please contact our VP of Client Services, Josh Mallalieu (josh@ipglab.com) to send a request.
Our coverage of the tech developer conference continues as the third annual Snap Partner Summit took the stage on Thursday. Although somewhat flying under the radar compared to its more high-profile competitors like Facebook and TikTok, Snapchat has been going strong over the past year, growing its global user base to 500 million monthly active users. At the top of its keynote, CEO Evan Spiegel proudly claimed that “nearly one out of every two smartphone users in the U.S.” now uses Snapchat, and it continues to be a Gen Z favorite, as the app reaches 90% of 13–24-year-olds in the U.S., UK, France, and Australia.
One of the reasons that Snapchat is able to carve out its own niche in the increasingly combative social media arena is its singular focus on AR-powered visual communication, which differentiates Snapchat from its competitors. And that is the main message that Snap hammered home during its hour-long presentation, which brought forth a number of interesting new features that are either relevant and actionable for brands, or setting up Snapchat as an AR-centered platform that reimagines brand interactions down the road. And Snap is doing so at three levels: the AR technology, the initiatives aimed at attracting digital creators to its platform, and the new features that are transforming its app into a brand-friendly developer platform. Let’s take a look at them one by one.
Pushing the Envelope on Consumer-Facing AR
Snapchat is no doubt the most AR-driven social platform today, and it continues to push the envelope on what AR experiences could look like on mobile and beyond. Many improvements were made to its SnapKit suite of developer tools to help create more realistic-looking 3D AR objects and experiences, including some enhancement to its Lens Studio to enable new capabilities in 3D Body Mesh and Cloth Simulation, enhanced audio editing features powered by machine learning, as well as a new StickerKit that allows developers to integrate Bitmojis into their own creations.
One standout new addition was the Connected Lens, which lets two Snapchat users share an interactive AR experience, regardless of whether they are in the same room or miles apart. This brings an important social element to the AR Lens on Snapchat, which so far has mostly been a solitary experience (with the exception of the collaborative Local Lens it debuted last fall). During the event, Snap showcased this new feature with a demo created in partnership with Lego, where two people can build a virtual Lego set together through the AR lens and see it come to life once completed.
Snapchat also made significant improvements to Scan, its built-in visual search tool, which is now easily accessible via a dedicated button on Snapchat’s main UI panel. Already capable of identifying songs, plants, dog breeds, wine bottles, and car models thanks to prior partner integrations, Scan now has a new feature called Screenshop that can now recommend clothing purchases based on outfits identified from photos. They also demoed an upcoming AllRecipe integration that allows users to pull up relevant recipes based on the grocery items that they scan. Overall, Snap continues to make its visual search tool more versatile and brand-friendly.
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the new edition of Spectacles, which is Snap’s latest take on AR headsets that the company unveiled at the very end of its presentation. Unlike the previous editions, this one appears to be a standalone device that doesn’t require a smartphone, and actually incorporates AR into the field of view. While it is a marvel that Snapchat has beaten most other tech companies to releasing a standalone headset made for AR experiences, it is also pretty clear that this is not meant to be a consumer-facing product. For one, the battery only lasts 30 mins per charge, and the field of view for the AR overlays seems to be quite narrow and far from fully immersive. Still, this new edition of Spectacles will serve as a cool developer tool to get AR creators to explore what a post-mobile AR experience could look like.
Overall, Snap’s commitment to make its AR tools more functional, social, and brand-friendly reflects the company’s strategic positioning as a self-proclaimed “camera company.” In a recent survey of its Gen Z users, the company found they are 150% more likely to communicate using images rather than text as compared to non-Snapchat users. For brands, this should serve as another reminder of the growing necessity for an AR strategy to engage with today’s mobile-first audience visually and interactively.
Fostering a Community of AR-Savvy Creators
Simply having the right tools won’t be enough for Snap to fulfill its AR platform ambition. Like any social platform, Snapchat smartly recognizes that it needs to get the creators on board to create video content and AR lenses at scale to keep its users engaged and entertained. This is where Snap’s “flying under the radar” status hurts its growth, as buzzy platforms like Instagram and TikTok continue to dominate the conversation around the “Creator Economy” and attract creators and influencers with massive audience reach, low creative barriers, and a growing set of monetization tools.
Cognizant of its disadvantage, Snap has been building out more user-friendly tools to lower the entry barrier for creators. Notably, Snap announced a new standalone iOS app called Story Studio that aims to provide a suite of vertical video editing tools to creators. One particularly cool feature of the app algorithmically surfaces the popular lenses and music being used on Snapchat to help inspire creators, which, in turn, gives Snapchat a new channel to influence creators and steer the trends.
Besides offering better creator tools, Snapchat is also launching a host of initiatives aimed at attracting creators and helping them monetize on Snapchat. For example, a new Gifting feature has been added to the story reply feature to let users tip their favorite Snap creators. It has already pledged $3.5 million in funding to support creators making AR lenses, in addition to launching an AR innovation lab called GHOST partnership with Verizon, which dedicates another $1 million to fund AR experiences powered by 5G. Thanks to these initiatives, some top Snapchat creators are reportedly earning serious money from making AR filters.
Two weeks ago, it also announced it is launching a new Creator Marketplace to help businesses to find and partner with Snapchat creators. At launch, the marketplace will focus on connecting brands and AR creators for AR ads, before expanding to include creators making content for Snap’s new TikTok rival, Spotlight later this year. Being able to partner with experienced Lens creators could help more brands create AR campaigns that are organic and authentic to the Snapchat users. Creator marketplace tools are becoming more common, with Facebook and TikTok now also providing similar options to help brands tap into their apps and the creator communities on their platforms.
By taking a rather aggressive approach, Snapchat is striving to attract more AR-savvy creators to its platform to help it grow its platform and foster a vibrant creator community. Part of the issue with Snapchat has been the insularity of its content, which limits the spread of its content outside the app. Snap partly tried to address that with a web portal for viewing Snap Stories, and with the launch of the CameraKit in 2019, third-party developers can also integrate Snapchat’s lenses into their own apps. Still, the app’s content rarely cross-pollinate on other social platforms, partly because the AR experience works better within the Snapchat app. To compete in the booming Creator Economy that is increasingly shifting audience attention from professionally produced media content to algorithmic feeds of user-generated content, Snap has shown that it has the right strategy, but it still has some work to do in order to remain competitive against other creator platforms.
Snapchat as an AR Platform for Brands
With advanced AR tools and a growing community of creators, it is natural for Snapchat to round out its platform ambition by courting brands with business-friendly features. Throughout the keynote, Snap announced a series of new additions to Snap Map, Snap Minis, SnapKit, and AR lenses to help brands better utilize its platform and engage with the Snapchat audience.
In particular, social commerce features were highlighted as potential points of brand integration. The aforementioned Screenshop feature enables fashion brands to explore AR try-ons, while new API-enabled lenses that will allow partnered brands to plug in their digital inventories so they will show up via Scan. Brands can now also set up Public Profiles for Businesses on Snapchat to surface their branded AR lenses and Snap Stories.
Brands can also enable browsing, try-on and buying through Shops, which turns Snapchat into a new point of sale. Estée Lauder was highlighted as one of the first companies to integrate their product catalog through Snapchat’s API, which makes it easy to create and publish new Dynamic Shopping Lenses that include price, availability, and a path to purchase. Gucci, American Eagle, and eyewear brand Clearly are also cited as success stories of brands integrating with AR try-ons and shoppable lenses. Snap claimed its users are two times more likely to make purchases if they have interacted with a product via AR lens than not.
In addition to shoppable Lenses, Snapchat also announced an intriguing new feature called Layers in the Snap Map, which overlays specific map layers sourced through media partners to help users discover local businesses. For example, Snapchat demoed a layer created by restaurant review site The Infatuation that surfaces the best local restaurants, as well as a map Layer built by Ticketmaster to help Snapchat users discover live shows near them. Although there’s no existing brand integrations at the moment, one could easily see how Snap may keep adding more dynamic layers for different types of local discoveries to help more brands drive store visits.
One last piece of Snap’s platform ambition is the Snap Mini, which Snapchat introduced last year to help developers to build mini-applications inside its app to engage with users. Positioning as a lightweight way to reach both iOS and Android users in one go, Snap Mini is perhaps the company’s most ambitious initiative that aims to set up its own AR-centered operating system that it could port into AR headsets that run independently of the duopoly in mobile OS today. Taking a page out of China’s super app WeChat, which has fostered a robust ecosystem of mini-apps on top of its own app, Snap is adding a “swiping down from the main tab” mechanism to make it easier for users to discover and access the Snap Mini apps. One particular highlight was the Snap Mini built by ecommerce app Poshmark, which allows Snapchat users to browse the entire catalog of products on Poshmark and interact with other shoppers during real-time “Posh Parties.”
Ahead of the event, Snap released a study on the future of AR and shopping, which was based on the research of 15,000 consumers across multiple markets and looked at the potential impact of AR trends in shopping, gaming, media, and entertainment. While we should take self-serving reports like this with a grain of salt, the report nevertheless provides some valid points in supporting AR’s growing popularity and platform potential.
It is evident that, besides Apple, no other company is better prepared to take on the post-mobile paradigm shift than Snap. Now with over 500 content partners and 200,000 developers on board, Snap’s strategy to make its platform dream a reality is coming together nicely. The main challenge now is in the implementation — to make sure they can stay ahead of the competition and grow into the prime destination for AR experiences.
Want to Learn More?
If you’d like to learn more about Snapchat’s announcements and their marketing implications, or simply to chat broadly about how to future-proof your AR strategies to prepare for the next computing paradigm shift, the Lab is here to help. You can start a conversation by reaching out to Josh Mallalieu (josh@ipglab.com).
