Brands have really jumped on the Snapchat bandwagon, film studio Twentieth Century Fox has purchased its first-ever “lens takeover” package to promote X-Men: Apocalypse, which lets users morph their faces into characters from the film and buy movie tickets directly from Snapchat ads.
Snapchatters in the US will have access to nine different character Snapchat Lenses, and then send photos or videos to friends or post them to their Story timelines. The nine X-Men character-based lenses including: Apocalypse, Cyclops, Mystique, Storm, Nightcrawler, Magneto, Quicksilver, Professor X and Beast.
Join the #XMen with the new #XMenApocalypse lenses on @Snapchat! Follow ‘XMenMovies’ today.https://t.co/7USBl9Bf0p
— X-Men Movies (@XMenMovies) May 23, 2016
The nine lenses have replaced the usual rainbow-spewing, the hugely popular dog filter and the beautifying filter, which has annoyed some users who feel that Snapchat is selling out. People took to Twitter to complain about the X-Men filters:
today is the worst day ever. they got rid of the dog filter on snapchat! for x-men filters! i hate x-men now!
— Damaris Stroker (@damarisstroker) May 23, 2016
X-Men bought ALL of the Snapchat lenses today and I’m freaking irate! Now I will purposely NOT be seeing that movie
— Jackie O (@JackieOProblems) May 23, 2016
thanks x-men for ruining snapchat
— Cass (@cassfly) May 23, 2016
Snapchat letting X Men take all of our precious filters away for a promo run what a travesty
— ryan (@rynvskv) May 23, 2016
Dear snapchat,
I don’t even like X-men
— Sassy In Stilettos (@Sass_Stilettos) May 23, 2016
how much you think “X-MEN” paid snapchat to remove all the filters and put only sponsored “X-MEN” filters up?!?
— Brennen Taylor (@BrennenTaylor) May 23, 2016
when snapchat only has X-men filters right now & you’re tryna be a dog ????????????????
— KhandiBaby (@lovely_khandi) May 23, 2016
Taking away all the cute filters on snapchat just makes me want to see x-men even less
— Nicole Pearce (@nicolep1113) May 23, 2016
Twentieth Century Fox is the first company to give the option to purchase a ticket to the most recent X-Men installment within the app. The X-Men ad appears within the Live and Discover stories, letting people swipe up and buy the tickets from Fandango.
Last year Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat said at his keynote at the Cannes Festival of Creativity that advertising on the platform will not be creepy. Spiegel said the ads on the platform can be effective without needing to gather a heap of personal data that other platforms do. The company is firm in not going too far with targeting.
“We really care about not being creepy,” Spiegel said. “That’s really important to us.”
On the Australian side, media agency GroupM launched the first vertical video campaign for clients Hungry Jack’s and Universal Pictures on Snapchat. The videos for Snapchat 3V are viewed by choice by consumers. They are 10 second, full-screen video ads that play with sound and integrated into the flow of Snapchat content.
