Imagine when the Snapchat selfie Lens above is branded with Iron Man 4. How much does Marvel pay for it?
Apparently as much as $750,000 for one peak day like a holiday, according to a report of an upcoming new Snapchat ad format from the Financial Times. This is Snapchat’s monetisation plan.
With an infamous young native user base, using traditional ads doesn’t seem like it would work. Snapchat ditched its initial, more traditional ad unit that put commercials like film trailers in people’s lists of Stories to watch.
Since most kids are on a budget, in-app purchases could be a tough sell. Snapchat is currently experimenting with the ability to Replay more than one snap for free a day, selling packs of three extra replays for $1. Maybe if some of its new facial recognition lenses that add animated effects to your face were cool enough, users would pay to customise their Snaps with them. The same goes for premium filters.
However, what they do have is plenty of friends and plenty of time. That’s why Snapchat’s recent Sponsored Geofilters make sense, allowing McDonalds to let you fill your screen with Big Macs if you’re near one of its restaurants. Or a film studio letting you throw its movie’s logo atop your snap. That’s why these more Sponsored Lenses, built atop the selfie animation technology Snapchat acquired by purchasing Looksery, could make this form of crowd-distributed advertising more interactive, personal, and engaging. While the Sponsored Filters can feel a bit tacked on to Snaps, the Sponsored Lenses inherently depend on the sender’s face, making them always unique and intimate. Those are great qualities for ads to have.
Snapchat seems to be homing in on a business model where it doesn’t have to unilaterally bombard users with cookie-cutter ads, and it doesn’t have to nickel and dime them with in-app purchases. Instead, it positions users as the vector for transmitting viral advertising under the guise of content.