Adweek: More Brands Are Investing in Custom Snapchat Lenses

Snapchat is set to cash in on its surreal selfies. Eight months after securing 20th Century Fox for its first sponsored lens to promote The Peanuts Movie, the number of marketers signing on for Snapchat's bespoke filters has steadily grown. Lenses, which add colorful filters to selfies—from rainbow vomit to zombie faces—are wildly popular with users, namely millennials. Lenses change regularly, keeping users coming back every day. And since last fall, brands can pay Snapchat to create sponsored filters that appear in the same section of the app for one day at a time.

"Snapchat is a very shiny object right now," said Craig Atkinson, chief investment officer at PHD. And sponsored lenses are "probably the white-hot center of their shiny object for a marketer."

Adweek recently tracked Snapchat's sponsored lenses to see which brands are buying the pricey ads (The Peanuts Movie campaign reportedly cost $750,000 for 24 hours on Halloween) and what future campaigns may look like. Demand has steadily risen and for 36 days spanning nearly all of June and the start of July, 14 brands ran sponsored lenses in the U.S., meaning that Snapchat sold the ad unit roughly once every three days. Six film studios including Sony Pictures, Universal Studios and Pixar purchased the ad to promote summer blockbusters such as Finding Dory and Ghostbusters aimed at Gen Y consumers. Meanwhile, Starbucks, Michael Kors and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) also created ads with branded decals, and three beauty brands (L'Oréal Paris, Urban Decay and Benefit Cosmetics) produced campaigns that applied makeup filters to selfies.

Wende Zomnir, Urban Decay's founding partner, explained that she was willing to pay for the ad unit because of its real-world application. "It was us taking something that people are already engaging with and creating a more playful way to execute it," she said.

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