AR Challenges: Your New Marketing Tool to Boost UGC
Discover the power of AR Challenges in advertising: organic UGC, increased brand awareness, global campaign reach, and no paid ads support needed!
As every savvy marketer knows, a successful campaign often requires an unusual approach. With much of our lives now unfolding in the digital realm, brands have access to rare opportunities to craft captivating and engaging campaigns that cater to the needs of the modern customer.
Today’s marketing campaigns and communications should feel as natural and organic as possible – with tons of content most of us watch every day, we simply don’t care about irrelevant and stiff banners or boring “let me tell you why brand brand is the best” messages. What works is content that you’d share with your friends, content that inspires others to create.
Today’s focus – AR Challenges – is the perfect tool to engage and empower your audience to create and share content with your branding included.
What is an AR Challenge?
The idea of an AR Challenge is simple: engage digital artists from all over the world to create immersive experiences with your branding. Watch social media users engage with the content and share it with their friends. Before you know it, your brand’s image is circling all over the internet.
Why does it work?
Ever since the iconic Dog Filter on Snapchat, social media users have loved the idea of AR and continue to use it to make their content more fun and relatable.
Whether it’s a randomizer telling us what our red flags are or beauty-enhancing viral filters such as Bold Glamour (no prep for the perfect selfie needed!), AR experiences allow us to really engage with social media platforms and other users, especially among the younger audience, the members of Gen Z.
Moreover, the opportunity for artists to monetize their AR Filters encourages talented individuals to participate in the challenge, showcasing their creativity for your brand.
We’ve all seen AR Filters going viral before, more often than any other medium, and the reason for that is simple: everyone can participate and share the filter, encouraging other users to participate in the trend and excluding the FOMO.
As a result, AR Challenges seem like the perfect way to reach your target audience. Imagine hundreds or even thousands of engaging AR Experiences made by professionals with your branding being shared on the Internet by your potential customers.
All you have to do is pick a theme and platform, decide on a prize pool, and watch the magic happen — even better if you let us do most of the work!
Success Stories
At Lenslist, we’ve achieved numerous successes alongside brands and platforms in crafting engaging activations for the AR community. Our efforts have resulted in over 8000 AR Filters generated, millions of UGC (user-generated content) and thousands of Creators participating in our challenges. We’ve partnered with major platforms such as Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Niantic, gaining insights into their unique features and optimizing strategies for each platform.
LENSLIST X EFFECT HOUSE Exploding Kittens Challenge
Through partnerships with Effect House and Exploding Kittens, we encouraged all digital artists to leverage TikTok’s love for interaction and entertainment to create playful AR Experiences, bringing the iconic board game into the digital world. This activation resulted in over 3000 submitted experiences with the game’s branding and global reach for the brand.
LENSLIST X NIANTIC Lightship Templates Challenge
To encourage AR Creators to explore the metaverse, we partnered with Niantic, the software development company behind the famous Pokémon GO. Niantic’s platform is renowned for its complex, plane-tracking experiences rooted in physical spaces, and the goal of our challenge reflected just that.
Participants were supposed to explore the broad possibilities of the Lightship, a cutting-edge toolset offering top-tier world mapping, semantic segmentation and shared AR features. Throughout the challenge, AR Creators elevated their skills, designing immersive worlds that blur the line between reality and the virtual realm
LENSLIST X SPARK AR Tomorrow Today Challenge
During the challenge, we collaborated with the UAE National Program for Coder’s HQ, Dubai’s Museum of the Future and two brand partners: Emirates Airline and Accenture. Together, we worked on the activation inviting AR Creators to design AR Filters for one of two tracks inspired by our partners: Emirates Airline’s ‘Mobility of Tomorrow’ and Accenture’s Opportunities of the Future.
This time, the winners were honored during the real-life award ceremony with a share of the $52,000 Prize Pool. In addition to monetary rewards, we curated a unique virtual gallery to showcase the best works from the Tomorrow Today challenge.
SNAP X LENSLIST AR Fashion Month Challenge
To celebrate fashion month, we teamed up with Snapchat, inviting AR Creators to unleash their creativity by designing digital fashion pieces and immersing themselves in the world of runways, photoshoots, and the latest industry trends. The challenge reached 66 countries worldwide with over 700 submissions. We rewarded the best designs with a $150,000 Prize Pool and curated yet another inspiring virtual gallery showcasing the winners.
In their projects, Lens Creators focused on using Snapchat’s best features for digital fashion projects. Assets such as 3D Body Tracking, 3D Body Mesh, Upper Garment Segmentation, and SnapML Audio were widely appreciated, creating an immersive try-on experience for all fashion enthusiasts.
Fashion knows no bounds in the digital world, and the winning effects proved to be the perfect example.
Benefits of AR Challenges
As previously mentioned, AR Challenges offer benefits for everyone involved: the brand, the Creators, and especially the customers. It all begins with talented digital artists who, driven by the opportunity to monetize their work, eagerly participate in the challenge, creating numerous AR experiences featuring the company’s branding.
Social media users then enjoy and interact with the AR Filters, sharing them across their social media channels, thus organically boosting user-generated content. This can lead to the campaign’s global reach, effectively spreading brand awareness all over the world.
Branded AR Experiences allow social media users to interact with the brand’s marketing, providing them with extra entertainment compared to traditional, non-interactive communication strategies. This direct engagement fosters a closer relationship between the customer and the company, ultimately building brand loyalty.
With the AR Challenges, the cycle of organic content creation with your branding goes on and on, expanding your audience and leaving you with timeless campaigns ready to engage social media users worldwide with little to no effort.
