Eye on AR - Fall 2022
A blog post dedicated to the people who know how to make communication with friends and family less boring! Our AR team has been busy this quarter working on creating new, innovative experiences for brands and their audiences. Keep reading to learn more about the *many* exciting projects they have been working on.
Lens List Fashion Month
Digital AR marketing company Lenslist held another challenge and our AR team just had to participate! We felt as though the Snapchat x Lenslist AR Fashion Month Challenge would be a perfect opportunity to experiment with Lens Studios’ newest features and to design a lens for the fashion/makeup market—a market where AR and its technologies are rapidly transforming the ways companies engage with customers.
The Snapchat x Lenslist AR Fashion Month Challenge called upon creators to “design original fashion and beauty lenses to help [the] AR community get dressed, made-up, and ready for the most stylish events of the year” (Lenslist).
Our lens, Elemental Euphoria, captures the beauty of nature with a fashion twist. The AR team designed three unique lenses inspired by the elements: earth, fire, and water. Each one contains wearable jewelry and makeup that incorporate custom 3D assets and 2D motion graphics. For example, for the earth, emerald jewels were used; for fire, gold, and designs that looked like the sun’s rays; for water, rain clouds, and other images associated with water.
The Elemental Euphoria Lens is a try-on lens that takes advantage of Lens Studios’ newest technologies including voice activation. When users speak, the lens will change to a different element. Try out “Elemental Euphoria” by clicking here, and congratulations to all the creators who participated in this contest!
Branded Effects for Instagram
Our AR team loves Instagram as much as Snapchat and TikTok! This September we designed and published 2 branded effects for Instagram Camera.
Have you ever wondered what tool you are, or what Mr. Men, Little Miss character you are? These two simple randomizer lenses we created for Snap-on and Mr. Men Little Miss allow users to engage with their favorite brands in a fun, interactive ways. Click the links below to test out the effects and share your results with us @baretreemedia.
Vote for Change
November 08, 2022 marked midterm elections in the United States. This Instagram camera effect encourages not just our fans but everyone to get out and vote. To vote for a change, every voice matters. Find our “Vote for a Change” filter on Instagram Camera or on our effects page.
Ugly Sweater
For National Ugly Sweater day on December 17, our AR team created a voice-activated, interactive try-on lens featuring four different ugly sweaters designed by BTM team members. We even created a BTM-themed sweater that features our company colors. Our team loved getting to create assets unique and personal to them.
Interested in something unique for your brand? Reach out to our team!
Bare Tree Media is a full-service creative studio and digital publisher creating super slick, mobile-facing content! We would love to bring your brand’s ideas to life through digital animation and AR. Check out our Augmented Reality page to see branded experiences we created for TikTok, Snapchat, & Instagram.
Eye on AR - Summer 2022
Our AR team has been busy this quarter working on creating new, innovative experiences for brands and their audiences. Keep reading to learn more about the *many* exciting projects they have been working on.
Lens List Snapchat Selection
Lens List wanted to join the Smurfs for a game of soccer! Our hyper-casual gamified lens, “Smurf Soccer,” was featured on Lens List’s June Snapchat Selection for its complexity and user-friendliness. It’s been an honor to be featured alongside so many other talented AR designers and studios. See Lens List’s Instagram for the feature post and try our “Smurf Soccer” Lens by clicking the snapcode!
This is not the first AR experience we created for the Smurfs. We also designed a gamified lens where users can help the Smurfs keep our beaches clean. This effect was created for the Smurfs’ larger sustainability campaign.
Baller Lenses
Bleed Green or The Dubs? Our AR designer, Wayne, created Celtics and Warriors “Final Spinner” Lenses for Snapchat and TikTok. Users were able to embrace their inner Tatum & Curry and support their favorite team during the NBA Finals. The Celtics and Warriors lenses had over 794,000 views and 630,000 views respectively on Snapchat.
As a Boston-based studio, we may be a bit biased, but we would like to offer up a congratulations to both teams on all their hard work and effort throughout the season. The 2022 NBA season has ended but show your support to two all-star teams next season by following us on TikTok!
Summer Fun
What better way to welcome Summer than with an AR experience? Pool float, palm tree, and ocean designs transport users to a place of tropical paradise and challenge them to put their beach ball volleyball skills to the test.
Using full-body tracking, users can hit a beach ball into the air. The lens also has multi-user capabilities, meaning you can play with your friends in the same frame. Try our Summer Beach Party Lens by clicking here.
Interested in something unique for your brand? Reach out to our team!
Bare Tree Media is a full-service creative studio and digital publisher creating super slick, mobile-facing content! We would love to bring your brand’s ideas to life through digital animation and AR. Check out our Augmented Reality page to see branded experiences we created for TikTok, Snapchat, & Instagram.
Twitter Emoji Campaigns: A Primer
What is a Twitter Emoji Campaign?
Twitter emoji campaigns are a visually smart way to separate your hashtag from other hashtags. As the name may imply, they aren’t permanent additions to a brand’s main hashtag, but rather are centered around a specific campaign that the brand is putting out.
For a price tag of $1M, Twitter will—for 90 days—attach a picture that you provide to a hashtag of your choice (given it doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s IP, of course).
On-the-nose advertisers may remember the tremendously successful #shareacoke campaign, one of the earliest campaigns to combine an emoji with a hashtag. The campaign created waves that led to the immediate introduction of other emoji/hashtag combinations.
The hashtag that launched a thousand twitter emojis
But how worth it really is it invest in a Twitter emoji campaign? Since the #shareacoke campaign debuted in 2015, the number of hashtag/emoji campaigns has skyrocketed up; what value do these little emojis hold that are making them mass hits?
The benefits are threefold:
Create Campaign Hype
Having a visual next to your hashtag will instantly create an association in people’s mind, and creates hype around the campaign. It separates your hashtag from other hashtags that may be similar, and even after the campaign ends, people will be left with the imprint reminder of your campaign. Additionally, it allows the user to create an emotional bond to the campaign that a text-only hashtag simply would not be able to achieve. The reason emojis are so popular is that people connect to them emotionally. Is your campaign cool? Funky? Nostalgic? Whimsical? The Twitter emoji’s art style paired with your hashtag will help determine this and will shape how people perceive the campaign overall. Yea, it’s that important.
Promotes Interaction Around the Campaign
A hashtag creates a quick avenue for a community to be built around the hashtag, and in turn around your campaign. Once again, the visual element greatly helps people quickly recognize the hashtag, so they’ll be able to click on it and begin to interact with others who are also using that hashtag. This creates a feedback loop where those who are interacting with each other build on the conversation and continue to use the hashtag, keeping it active for others to see in their timelines and become interested in!
It Improves the ‘stopping power' of your Tweet
Twitter users cumulatively generate millions of tweets a day, so the average user is scrolling quickly down an array of hashtags. Internally, Twitter refers to tweets and hashtags that hold people’s attention and pause them in their action of scrolling ‘stopping power’—essentially, it’s a level of retention that determines how effective a campaign is going to be in a user’s mind.
Twitter found that the stopping power of tweets with emojis increased by 10%, and if those tweets were promoted, that figure jumped up to 6x their previous impressions.
Case Study: Christopher Robin
For the release of their new movie Christopher Robin, Disney asked BTM to help them with their Twitter campaign, and we were more than happy to oblige! Christopher Robin was a movie steeped in nostalgia, so we definitely wanted to play up that angle and create emojis that felt timeless and resonated emotionally with the user. They actually had five hashtags, one for each of the ‘major” characters in the movie as well as one for the movie title:
Lovingly rendered above are #Pooh, #ItsPiglet, #Eeyore, and #Tigger! All for Disney's #ChristopherRobin!
This was one of our first Twitter emoji campaigns, as well, so we were very excited and curious to see how it would fare. The thought was that users would have an emotional reaction to the characters’ faces and thus use the hashtags because of it.
Once the hashtags were live, we monitored the hashtags to see how they were doing. Sure enough, almost immediately we began seeing tweets that reflected nostalgia beyond what we even expected. Some users were tweeting specifically for seeing the hashtag characters!
So for your brand’s next ad campaign, consider utilizing the power of Twitter emojis! And if you need someone to help you out, hit us up!
Happy World Emoji Day 2018
It is 2018, and Emojis have taken over. The once perceived “silly, childish” messaging stickers have become completely integrated into our daily conversations. Snapchat filters even let us turn ourselves into our very own Bitmoji. Emojis allow us to demonstrate feelings and emotions to a greater specificity than our words. Here at Bare Tree Media, we pride ourselves on being the original and the longest-standing emoji designer. Day in and day out, we work to give everyone the ability to say just what they want (with OR without words 😉). It seems with each new day more emojis are created by designers across the globe providing each of us with unique ways to express ourselves or just have fun!
Apple’s Custom Emojis: Memoji
World Emoji Day calls for big news, and companies have delivered. Apple Inc. announced they will be releasing Emoji 11.0 for iOS and MacOS, an emoji pack including 66 new emojis for Apple fans to enjoy in late 2018. Along with these new emojis Apple is also releasing their Bitmoji counter, Memoji. The 3D emoji will be available with iOS 12 this fall. Memoji’s are to follow-up Apple’s animated stickers that use facial recognition to overlay animal filters, Animojis. Memoji’s take the next step and allow users to create and use their custom Emoji stickers to express themselves in a unique audio-visual hybrid. With innovations like these, developers are reimagining where and how emojis can exist, proving the only way is up.
Facebook's Emoji Keyboard Stays Strong
Facebook and their messenger are one of the leaders in the emoji space, having adopted all 2,800 Unicode Emojis. Unicode is a consortium of the biggest tech companies and a few countries, who decide on what should or should not be an emoji. Facebook once again proudly released their annual Emoji statistics, demonstrating significant increases in emoji use and engagement. Here are just some of the numbers:
- Over 5 billion emojis are sent everyday in Messenger
- 900 million emojis are sent on Messenger that don’t even have text
- 700 million emojis are used in Facebook posts everyday
- The 😂emoji is the most popular around the world
- The ❤️emoji has doubled in usage in the past year
Twitter Branded Emojis
Emojis have made their mark on our society, and now large companies are working towards making their own mark through branded emoji stickers.
Recently, Twitter teamed up with Disney to release custom emojis of the upcoming movie Christopher Robin and chose us to create them! Each of core 100 Acre Woods characters got their own little emoji to accompany their hashtag. Tweets including #ChristopherRobin, #Pooh, #Tigger, #Eeyore and #ItsPiglet grew in number. Twitter users that might not have engaged with tweets involving the Christopher Robin movie in a normal situation began tweeting about the movie. Some solely so that they could have the emojis on their feed!
Emoji Merchandise
There are now emoji clothing, pillows, an Emoji Movie, and now premiering tonight in New York City, “EmojiLand: The Musical” on Broadway just a couple theaters down from The Lion King. Many companies have realized the power of emojis, and how developing new emojis allows for each company to integrate themselves in a language rapidly growing in popularity. No one truly knows the future of emojis, but we do know it’s bright. 🌟
Join Us and Share Your Favorite Emoji with Bare Tree Media on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!