Tag: Camera as input

Snapchat Spectacles Now Widely Available Via Online Shop

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After several months of using pop-up vending machines to sell its first hardware product, Snap Inc. has made its camera-integrated sunglasses Spectacles widely available for purchase via Spectacle.com. All three colors are available for $130 a pair – keeping with the retail pricing of the pop-up vending machines – with an estimated delivery time of 2 to 4 weeks. Snap also says the elusive vending machines will return in a series new locations after a brief break.

What Brands Need To Do
In its filing for IPO, Snap indicated its intention to broaden the roll-out of Spectacles. Making it available via a dedicated ecommerce site is certainly a big step in that direction. Spectacles presents an interesting new tool for brands to create Snapchat-native video content, which brands such as Toyota and L’Oreal have started doing as part of their social influencer strategies. More brands need to align their branded content production with the ongoing trend towards mobile-native, camera-first media creation and consumption habits. When the consumers are just as likely to point their camera at things they find interesting and take a video of it to share on social channels, brands need to find an authentic way to take advantage of this trend to generate share-worthy content and engage with selfie-happy customers.

If you have yet to experience the magic that is Snapchat Spectacles, the Lab has a couple of pairs that you can try on yourself to gain a hands-on understanding of the great “un-bundling” happening in the mobile space.

 

Source: AdWeek

Pinterest Launches Mobile Visual Search Tool In Public Beta

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pinterest has launched its Lens virtual search tool on its mobile app as a public beta test. Starting today, Lens allows iOS users to point their smartphone cameras at anything, and Pinterest’s A.I.-powered algorithm will automatically pick apart the objects in an image and categorize them down into foods, animals, clothing, or even patterns like hexagons. Then users will be presented with a slew of pins featuring identical or visually similar items. Building on the visual search function it previewed last year, Pinterest says Lens will also come with a “Shop The Look” feature that isolates each fashion items, from hats to jeans to shoes, in an image that surface shoppable pins featuring each of those pieces.

What Brands Need To Do
According to a recent study by Millward Brown, 83% of active Pinterest users have purchased a product because of something they saw on the site.As Pinterest continues to build out its ecommerce features, brands interested in social commerce, especially those whose target audiences overlap with Pinterest users, should leverage them to boost direct sales by adding support for the “shopping cart” and experimenting with Buyable Pins.

Moreover, with the quick advancement of machine learning and AI-powered solutions, we are starting to see examples of brands primarily using the camera as an input source of the mobile user interface and leverage images to learn about user intent. Snapchat is a prime example of leveraging the camera to engage with mobile users. This trend should provide some inspiration to brands looking to update their digital user experience to be more intuitive and convenient for mobile users.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Snapchat Updates Ad Platform, Rolls Out “Snapcodes” That Open Websites

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat launched a revamped ad platform on Tuesday with some nods to the ad tech platform of Facebook. Snapchat first opened up its ad API in October to enable brands advertisers to purchase ads at scale, conduct A/B testing, and receive real-time analytics. The new ad platform adds six new API partners as part of this announcement, bringing the total to 15. Snapchat has also inked partnerships with five third-party ad tech providers, including mParticle, Kochava and LiveRamp, to facilitate audience-matching campaigns.

In related Snapchat news, the messaging app also updated its “Snapcode” feature to allow all users to generate the proprietary QR-codes that now can not only ink to Snapchat profiles, but also opens designated web urls via an in-app browser. Whenever users take a “snap” of a Snapcode, a pop-up window prompts them to either open the ink. Snapchat will also provide in-app analytics for Snapcodes that are scanned for more than 100 times, including the total number of scans over the past three months, as well as the percentage of people who opened the link after scanning it.

What Brands Need To Do
Snapchat introduced the Snapcodes for user profiles in January 2015 to let users add each other without having to type out usernames. Soon, many brands and publishers started using Snapcodes in their social media profiles to draw attention to their respective Snapchat account. Throughout 2016, brands like Sprite, FOX network, and Universal Pictures featured customized Snapcodes in their billboard ads and packaging to drive mobile users to check out more branded content on Snapchat. Therefore, this expansion of Snapcode functions should come as a welcome addition to brands as it opens up more possibilities for brands to incorporate it in their campaigns to bridge the print ads and the digital assets.

According to Snapchat Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan, the average Snapchat user opens the app 18 times per day and spends 25-30 minutes a day in the app. Now with the added support for ad buying, Snapchat took another big step in improving its ad products to match its rapid growth. Brands need to consider getting on Snapchat to reach its young-skewing users via not only standard video ads, but also more unconventional ad units such as custom Geofilters and branded selfie lenses.

 

Source: TechCrunch & Marketing Land

Hutch Shows What Your Room Could Look Like With Furniture You Can Buy Directly

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Hutch, a Los Angeles-based startup, is taking a mobile-native approach to disrupt the interior design and online furniture retail market. The Hutch app, available on both iOS and Android starting today, allows users to submit a picture of their living room or bedroom and receive virtual makeovers by swiping through a variety of decor themes, ranging from Boho to Urban Industrial. The company developed a technology can automatically recognize the scale of the room and populate it with furniture items that are available for purchase directly from the app. Users can also submit a photo and wait a day to receive a customized decor plan from human interior designers.

What Brands Need To Do
This new app provides yet another example of the ongoing shift in designing mobile user experience, where the camera becomes a prominent input source that enables virtual product sampling. This also facilitate new business models where free virtual sampling and consultations function as the gateway for customer acquisition. Another recent example in this regard is the Dressing Room app that Gap officially launched earlier this week after previewing it at this year’s CES. The AR-enabled app lets online shoppers generate a virtual 3D based on their own measurements and try on different outfits. If they like how certain items look on the virtual mannequin, they can purchase them directly from the app. These two examples should provide some inspiration to brands looking to update their digital user experience to be more intuitive and convenient for mobile users.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Warner Bros. Taps Branded Puzzle-Game Lens To Engage Snapchat Users

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Warner Bros. is the first brand to use Snapchat’s recently added puzzle-game Lens to engage with users. As part of its promotional campaign for the upcoming movie King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, the studio created a Snapchat Lens that would overlay a crown and a robe on the selfies and turn them into an interactive mini-puzzle game where users move tiles around to reassemble the edited selfies. This sponsored Lens first ran on Saturday.

What Brands Need To Do
This serves as the latest example of brands exploring the unconventional ad products that Snapchat offers in hopes of connecting with mobile users. While studios buying sponsored Snapchat Lens is not exactly new, (last May, for example, 20th Century Fox bought the first-ever Snapchat Lens takeover ad to promote its X-Men movie.) this gamified Lens from Warner Bros. brought some interactivity into the mix to further drive engagement.

As Snapchat’s ad business start to catch up to its rapid growth, the company is presenting brands with a lot of interesting opportunities to explore what the future of mobile advertising looks like. Therefore, it is time for brands to reconsider their media mix and consider adjust the ad budget to include emerging global channels like Snapchat so as to reach customers at scale.

 

Source: Variety

Snapchat Teases Secret Filters, Hints At The Future Of AR Marketing

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snap Inc. has started testing a new hidden feature that let users unlock secret filters when they point the camera to the charging case of Spectacles, the camera-embedded sunglasses the company introduced last year. As the twitter video below demonstrates, when one opens Snapchat and points the camera to the “Spectacles” printed on the charging case, the app unlocks a special filter that shows floating bubbles of snaps, similar to the circular videos captured by Spectacles.


What Brands Need To Do
Fun and innocuous as this new feature may seem at first glance, it might just be hinting at the next big ad product for Snap. It is easy to imagine how Snap Inc. would soon follow the roadmap set by its branded Geofilters and come out with “sponsored secret filters” for brands to buy. Looking beyond that, however, a bigger opportunity lies in the fact that this feature can transform ordinary objects, and by extension, the physical space they reside in, into an AR-enhanced branding opportunity. For example, an auto brand can use this feature to drive car enthusiasts to dealerships to unlock special themed filters while a retailer may work with Snap Inc. to turn an in-store installation into a trigger for unlocking secret filters that contain special offers or branded content. 

With the launch of Spectacles, Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc. and rebranded itself as a “camera company,” aiming to liberate cameras from smartphones and integrate them into other wearable products for a more frictionless user experience. As it continues to improve its existing ad products, more and more brands are joining Snapchat to reach mobile consumers. In fact, a new report by digital marketing firm L2 found that Snapchat’s brand adoption rate grew 50% from January to October last year, with 64% of brands now established a presence on the app. As Snap continues to bring augmented reality technology to the mass market with its camera-centric products, brands will need to start to think about how AR may add value to their products, services, and marketing efforts.

 

Source: Twitter @MosheIsaacian & AdExchanger

 

Snap Inc. Starts Selling Spectacles With Pop-Up “Snapbots”

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snap Inc. has started rolling out its first hardware product Spectacles, a pair of camera-equipped sunglasses that automatically syncs videos with your Snapchat, in an intriguing fashion. The company will be rolling out Snapbot, an interactive vending machine painted in its signature bright yellow, around the country, starting today with one on Venice Beach near its L.A. headquarter. The Snapbot features a large eye-shaped display and can recognize customers approaching thanks to its front-facing camera. The locations of the Snapbots will change on a daily basis and fans can visit spectacles.com to discover where the Snapbots will appear next.

Why Brands Should Care
Snap Inc. is smart to choose this intriguing way to roll out Spectacles, which drives fan enthusiasm and engagement with elements of surprise and limited-time urgency. But perhaps more importantly, the arrival of Spectacles signals that we are approaching an age where cameras are increasingly becoming one of our primary input sources of our digital interactions. Beyond Snapchat, Mastercard is now allowing app users in Europe to authenticate their payments with a selfie, and the Hawaii Tourism Authority recently launched a digital campaign that uses facial recognition technology to create personalized travel recommendations and offer tailored travel packages. As these examples indicate, the surging prominence of visual input is set to bring a new set of opportunities and challenges that brands will have to learn to navigate in order to adapt to the shifting consumer digital habits and stay connected with their audiences.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of Spectacles’ YouTube