AR experiences don’t have to cost a fortune. Companies can take advantage of the dollars they’ve already spent by re-using existing creative assets for AR experiences.
Augmented Reality experiences are built using original media, including photos, graphics, illustrations, video, and sound. Rather than producing all of these materials from scratch, which can be costly, there are ways to capitalize on the money you’ve already spent. Marketing is one of the biggest use cases for AR and we’ve found that sharing marketing assets between traditional media and AR projects can reduce superfluous and exorbitant costs, while creating exciting experiences that engage your audience in a whole new way.
In this example, we used an existing set of advertisements to produce a high-performing Naked Juice Snapchat Lens.
A Snapchat Lens is a feature built into Snapchat that modifies your selfies to look like pretty much anything. People have built lenses to make users look like celebrities, monsters, animals, and more.
As an AR experience, a Snapchat Lens works in real time. That means you can see yourself with the lens on before you even take a picture.
To date, there are more than 2.5 million lenses available. While Snapchat produces many of its own, the vast majority of the lenses are produced by ordinary users and third-party designers like Fishermen Labs.
People like Snapchat Lenses because they are cool, fun, and often unpredictable. It provides an opportunity to share more selfies with people. That makes lenses a great tool for marketing purposes.
How we turned Naked Juice Video Ads into a Lens
We developed a four part lens for Naked Juice:
- A Coconut lens that turns a user’s head into an exploding coconut.
- A Banana lens that turns a user’s head into a banana, surrounded with exploding fruit.
- A Unicorn lens that turns a user’s head into a colorful unicorn.
- A Superhero lens that puts superhero garb on the user.
Each lens plays a short animation before removing itself.
Naked Juice supplied us with assets from four video ads to source material from. Each video turned into one of the lenses.
It might be a challenge to turn 2D video images into 3D AR assets. But fortunately, Naked Juice gave use the 3D models they used to produce the video ads in the first place.
Creating the Snapchat Lens, then, was straightforward. We simply loaded the 3D models into Snapchat and made some tweaks to better fit the application.
Advantages of repurposing marketing material for AR
There are several advantages to repurposing marketing materials:
- Building new materials from scratch is time-consuming and expensive.
- Multi-use assets create a cost-savings and expands the reach of your marketing dollars
- Using the same assets in multiple places builds brand continuity.
- AR experiences are highly engaging and create more opportunities for sharing online and spreading awareness of your brand.
Launching a new AR experience can be costly, with the convergence of concepting, design, and development. Creative costs can be reduced by taking one idea and using it in multiple places. This saves time and money, allowing businesses to reach their market in a more efficient way.
Brand continuity is when customers see the same images, sounds, or slogans used for the same brand. It’s the reason why we associate McDonald’s with a red and yellow ‘M’. By keeping brand appearances continuous, you establish a sense of presence in physical space that makes your brand feel reliable and recognizable.
When customers see the coconut video ad and the coconut Snapchat Lens, they will get a sense of Naked Juice as a continuous company. It will also signal that Naked Juice has the wherewithal to make extra marketing material, meaning they have enough money sloshing around to make a good product.
Getting people to share media online is a powerful tool for marketing. And people share different media in different ways. One person might be more likely to share a video, while another will be more likely to share a funny selfie with a coconut head. Repurposing marketing materials gives consumers more chances to share these materials along more channels. And AR experiences, in particular, tend to be highly shareable.
How you can repurpose existing marketing materials for AR
AR is such a new field that the possibilities are endless. If you have ads or photos – or anything – you want to repurpose, you are only limited by your creative imagination. We welcome the opportunity to explore all of your ideas!
- Product Try-ons: Here, you can turn clothing from your ads into a lens that lets customers see what the clothes will look like on them. This helps them make more informed decisions.
- View-In-Room: Here, you can leverage surface or plane tracking to detect a user’s desk, floor, or any surface to place objects or images in the user’s physical space. This can be leveraged for games, full-scale product visualization, and planning purposes. Curious whether a chair is the right size for your living room, or whether a coffee table you like will go along with your sofa? Now just pull out your phone to find out.
- Location based AR: Suppose you have an ad set in a famous location, like Times Square. You could then have an AR animation of the ad play when users are in Times Square, using their smartphone’s video as a backdrop.
- Face Filters: Combine triggers and touches and design super fun AR filters where users can play with their face. Users can control game elements using face expressions, touches or head turns. Face AR game filters are sure to boost your user time-spent in the app and increase satisfaction.
- World Lenses: Here, experiences are visualized through the outward facing camera and can detect and map the environment and surface around you. Through World Lenses, users can actually interact with 3D objects overlaid on the world for incredibly high immersion and engagement.
The best strategy depends on what marketing materials you have to begin with. In the case of Naked Juice, we were fortunate enough to start with some pretty great 3D models, but in other situations that might not be the case. We may have to create new models from images or physical objects.
We at Fishermen Labs are excited to see how AR continues to develop into more use cases as time goes on. In the future, sharing activations of all kinds will result in more AR experiences being created.
