Digiday AI-Powered Planning Strategies:

Join us on July 30 in NYC for a breakfast & panel

APPLY TO ATTEND

Some Snapchat users aren’t happy about X-Men’s lenses takeover

Brands are invading Snapchat more than usual today.

Snapchat users are noticing that its usual array of rainbow-spewing and other assorted face lenses have been completely displaced by several sponsored lenses for the upcoming “X-Men: Apocalypse” movie. That’s because Twentieth Century Fox purchased Snapchat’s first-ever “lens takeover” package, which lets users morph their faces into characters from the movie.

Some people, however, feel that Snapchat is selling out to companies and running the fun lenses that make the app unique.

Naturally, they took to Twitter to complain:

Relax: the regular selection of lenses come back tomorrow.

In addition to the lens-centric promotion, Twentieth Century Fox is the first company to let users buy tickets to the upcoming X-Men installment within the app. The ads will appear starting today and until May 26 within the Live and Discover stories, letting people swipe up and buy the tickets from Fandango.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, although it’s likely in the high six-figures. Digiday previously reported lens can cost as much as $700,000. So, it’s not shocking that a deep-pocketed movie studio is once again wading into untested waters with a pricey Snapchat promotion. Last year, Fox Studio’s “The Peanuts Movie” was the first brand to buy a sponsored lens and Sony bought the first ever pop-up Discover channel for James Bond’s “Spectre.”

More in Media

WTF is LLM honeypotting?

Publishers and ecommerce brands under siege from AI crawlers are starting to fight back with an old security trick updated for the LLM era: “LLM honeypotting.” 

Why a once-anonymous creator unmasked herself to build a bigger media brand 

Kristi Cook used to YouTube anonymously. Once she revealed her face, her account became wildly popular.

Creators are crashing through Hollywood, but there’s a ceiling

Hollywood is tapping creators for hit horror films, unique IP, and cameos, but there are limits to their star power in its current state.