As AR becomes a bigger consideration, with enhanced eCommerce and data applications, along with the expected arrival of AR-enabled smart glasses sometime soon, Snap Inc. is looking to help more brands take the leap into AR campaigns with the launch of a new creative studio for AR, called Arcadia.
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As explained by Snap:
“Arcadia is a creative studio focused on the next generation of branded Augmented Reality experiences. Powered by a team of world-class experts that pioneered mobile Augmented Reality, we translate new technology into the most innovative, impactful, and effective experiences on behalf of our partners. With AR as our singular focus, we deliver across platform, web and app-based environments.”
The new studio will provide direct connection between brands and experienced AR experts, with a view to creating new, fresh tools and campaigns that will help them stand out on the platform, and ideally win their own viral moment with their branded promotions in the app.
Which has long been a key lure of Snap’s AR tools. While other, more well-resourced platforms ae now also moving into AR, Snapchat has been able to maintain a steady flow of viral visual trends through the creative and cultural nous of its development teams, which it’s now looking to open up to brand partners as well, which could provide significant opportunity.
What’s more, Snapchat says that Arcadia will be ‘platform agnostic’, so the experiences that the Arcadia team create won’t necessarily be confined to Snapchat itself, and could, theoretically, live on, in various forms and formats, helping expand the potential of these projects.
Snap’s expertise in this arena could be a major boost, but it’ll likely also come at a significant cost. That could put Arcadia projects out of the reach of smaller brands, while Snap also notes that Arcadia will work ‘on a studio model’, meaning it will take on select projects ‘that require the most creative and technical skillset’.
So it won’t be available to everyone, as such. But still, it could lead to a new range of cutting-edge AR approaches and campaigns, that could also help Snapchat facilitate an expanded range of AR experiences for more campaign types via its self-serve Lens Studio.
It’s an interesting initiative, which could have major potential as a key incubator for next-level AR experiences.
And again, with AR glasses coming very soon, that could become a much bigger consideration for many more brands in the near future.
