National Women’s Hockey League 2018 AllStar Weekend – Snapchat AR Lens (2018)

CASE STUDY

CLIENT:
National Women’s Hockey League

AGENCY:
n/a – direct with client

DELIVERABLES:
• Snapchat AR Concepts
• Snapchat Lens Studio Project
• Stylized Snapcode
• Lens Studio Introduction & Training

TECHNOLOGY:
• Snapchat Lens Studio
• Snapchat for iOS & Android
• Blender
• Adobe Creative Cloud

OBJECTIVE:
Create a Snapchat AR Lens / filter for the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) 2018 AllStar Weekend. The AllStar Weekend event featured select athletes from the league’s four rostered teams in 2018; Boston Pride, Buffalo Beauts, Connecticut Whale, and Metropolitan Riveters, all competing in both individual and team-based games. The Lens / filter should utilize Snapchat to reach the NWHL’s most important growing market segment; a younger female demographic that looks up to and idolizes the best professional female hockey players in the world. The Lens / filter will be geofenced and actively promoted on-site, with the intent of garnering social shares from attendees at the 2-day event.

SOLUTION:
With the release of Snapchat’s developer platform, Snapchat Lens Studio, just a few weeks prior to conceptualizing this project, the software was still in it’s infancy and only allowed developers to create 2D filters and frames. Despite not being augmented reality in it’s purest form, we wanted to integrate a basic 3D-like experience, while also creating a branded frame that would help foster brand recognition and engagement when shared. ShowMeVirtual created a basic model of an NWHL-branded hockey arena, fans, stick, puck, and goal, and rendered out each frame as a short animation, in order to integrate this 3D effect into a 2D-only filter. We also placed the logos for each of the four teams into the filter to help promote them equally alongside the NWHL and it’s AllStar Weekend branding.

Because the platform was brand new, we did a brief training session with the client’s social media team in order to help them launch the Snapchat Lens on the NWHL’s official channel. Working through Snapchat directly, the NWHL deployed the Lens with a geofilter, promoting it within the Snapchat platform to fans in physical attendance of the event. The NHWL further promoted the Lens online through social media, ultimately enabling fans both at the event and at home to participate in the AllStar festivities, all while driving engagement for the NWHL.