Lootbox AR

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  Lootbox!

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Problem: Brands need new ways to reach consumers

A key goal for brands is to directly connect with their customers and prospects, while keeping their CAC low. Given consumption patterns of consumers, it's getting more and more difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd.

Snap already does an excellent job in helping brands market in new ways given sponsored ads and lenses, but we believe the future of marketing is location-aware, which is what we built for this hackathon!

Our solution: Lootboxes with Custom Location AR

With our lens, Snapchatters will see locations of nearby "lootboxes" that brands have placed within the area, that have special rewards to redeem like discounts and access to limited edition items. How it works:

1. Snapchatter opens our Lootbox AR lens
2. They see markers showing them how far they are from each Lootbox that the brand has placed around the city
3. As they near the location, the AR components will pop out of the location with the reward to redeem
4. We use Persistent Storage to track that this user has seen this lootbox already so we don't show them this one again

How we built it

We utilized multiple lens features in order to pull this off, and there's much more we'll be building going forward.

We used Custom Location AR as the backbone of Lootbox, but we realized that a primary challenge here is that we need our lens to have dynamically updating meshes based on which location a user is at. This may seem straightforward with just a few locations hardcoded into the lens, but to do this at scale with dozens of locations, we built in logic to track the user's distance from any location to predict which one they're closest to.

In addition, we used Persistent Storage to preserve state for any individual user - we don't want to show the user locations they've already been to, so we write to Persistent Storage when the user sees a location, then read from storage to determine which location markers to show the user. We're still building more! We're currently building out the logic for a brand to manage their Lootboxes through a web interface, which will introduce even more complexity into the lens since we'll have to add and remove locations dynamically.

Monetization and TAM

We're focusing on monetization from day 1. Lootbox AR is designed for brands to use this lens as the sponsored lens where they'll build on top of it with their own rewards and locations to place Lootboxes. Snap's incredible Creator Marketplace will help us bootstrap the development of the lens and gives us distribution to brands.

In addition to revenue from the sponsored lens, we'll set up an entire web application for brands to manage their Lootboxes and see analytics and attribution, which we'll charge a SaaS subscription for. We believe we can charge either an overall SaaS price for use of the platform, with upsells based on add-ons like analytics, forecasting, and recommended locations for brands to place Lootboxes.

Roadmap for Lootbox AR

This hackathon was the kickoff moment for Lootbox but we're not stopping there. We believe that location-aware marketing is the future of how brands will connect with consumers going forward, and it's a massive opportunity for Lootbox and Snap.

Built With

• javascript
• lens
• snap