Snapchat Adds to Native Ad Arsenal With Sponsored Lens
Snapchat’s ad formats are growing ever closer to its traditional content. A year after debuting its first ad product, one that siloed brands within users’ recent-updates feeds, the mobile messaging app is now allowing brands into the actual “snaps” that people send one another.
On Saturday, Snapchat will introduce a new ad format, Sponsored Lens, that will let people add an animated, branded filter to selfies they send with the app. 20th Century Fox will be the first brand to advertise using the Sponsored Lens format.
To promote its upcoming “The Peanuts Movie,” the film studio’s Halloween-themed Sponsored Lens will add Snoopy dancing in a pumpkin patch in the foreground of people’s selfies, Woodstock on their heads and an animated stream of candy corn pouring into their mouths, set the to tune of the “Linus and Lucy” theme. The system uses facial recognition technology to detect a person’s face and then applies the filter around it.
