Our team has designed AR within Lens Studio utilizing Snapchat’s premade materials as well as built interactive experiences using Javascript, and SnapML for clients in the past. However, one of the more complex and exciting projects we worked on was with a music festival client to build out a custom StylUs app that not only included AR but gamified the festival app.
The StylUs app utilized digital currency, generated crowd-sourced advertising campaigns, provided year-round fan participation, offered AR integration, and increased average daily app usage / time spent from only being useful during the event itself to an average of 7 hours of screen time per user annually.
Pre-event, fans that downloaded the application could spend time playing custom build games like moon jumper, ring toss, bubble popper and more to earn digital currency they can exchange for prizes, merch, and ticket upgrades.
The bubble popper game, for instance, used the lyrics of a song from one of the artists performing at the festival in the bubbles. The app tied in directly to Spotify to play that artist’s song in real time to match the lyrics they were popping. As fans and users popped the bubbles it not only helped to drive artists streams on the platform but served to get fans really accustomed to the song and learn the lyrics. The more time spent, the more bubbles popped, the more currency earned, the more digital currency earned, the higher their chance to win, all while driving streams for the artists.
We also partnered with the artist’s teams and labels so that we could use their music video in the app and allow fans to share a snippet on instagram. Fans could record themselves in Luke Combs’ “Beer Never Broke My heart” video singing or performing and fans would be green-screened into the actual music video. The final video was branded and could post directly to Instagram. We could require them to use specific hashtags for tracking, tag the festival, etc which further created awareness, engagement, and FOMO.
Another AR feature implemented was a virtual scavenger hunt on festival grounds. Using bouncing coins hidden around the festival, fans and attendees could collect them and unlock prizes, upgrades, and meet & greets. The coins were strategically placed near the festival’s brand partner activations, food & beverage, and merch stand so that we could better control touchpoints, provide a higher ROI for our partners, and offer a wildly different in app/real life experiences to the attendees.
And finally we implemented push notifications that would notify users of a “virtual bonfire” each night where attendees could get together and hold their phone out and experience an artist standing around a burning campfire performing an acoustic song. One shared AR experience across 40,000 attendees. The virtual bonfire events drove further downloads, more screen time, more impressions for our partners, increased merch sales, and much more data capture.