Our thoughts on Snapchat's Sports and Weather Filters

You won’t tap on the Snapchat app on your phone when you need to know either the weather or score of your favorite game. However, Snapchat is investing on licensing deal so as to furnish users with such information. But why this “self-destructing” photos and videos app is spending increasing amount of money on these deals? Perhaps the app now wishes to achieve more of an interpersonal aim. It endeavors to enable people to give more context of their lives to their acquaintances and friends. 

So, if in one of your images or videos, you are chattering your teeth, people can notice that the temperature around is extremely low. Or you can express your merriment of a football goal made by your favorite team through an animated scoreboard (though it gets static one saved and shared) right on your image.

Is it a Good Move by Snapchat?

Snapchat was the first social app that offered its audience digital filters for their pictures and videos. Since then, it has been experimenting and innovating with various filters and features. Thus, discarding this step in its baby stage won’t be a right thing to do.

In fact, Domenic Venuto (who oversees Weather Co.’s consumer partnership) mentioned that considering the engagement of the app with the young audience, he couldn’t refuse to the proposal of the partnership. With these new filters, the audience using the app can ornament their images with the weather forecast and even decorate the images with a score of the game that they are attending.

Snapchat claims that with such geofilters, it endeavors to create a more personalized experience for all its users. All these filters make people more enthusiastic to share their moments.

Leveraging Data from Such Filters

There are indeed some serious thoughts that have been put behind offering the users these score and weather publishing filters. 

When Snapchat reached out to ScoreStream which is known for its database of 50K volunteers who input real-time data for sports played in high school, it cracked a deal to feature 5,000 high school football game score every week in the last year. The scoreboard, though, had Gatorade’s logo on it and the whole campaign was to promote this sports-themed beverages and food product brand. This year, Snapchat did the same but replaced football with basketball. 

Thus, Snapchat leveraged the data to its full potential and successfully turned it into effective advertising tool.

Wrapping Up

Though full-fledged response on these new filters of Snapchat is yet to come from the users, the partners are already sharing their share of innovative ideas in these new filters. They suggested making the weather data as the basis of many decisions for the users. For instance, making the temperature change as a predictor of consuming ice cream or moving up of dynamic alarm if the weather forecast shows rain in the morning.

Though the financial analysts are in doldrums regarding Snapchat new filters magnetizing the advertisers, the partners have high hopes. They believe that the data creates a narrative around the media you share and that’s how Snapchat is the absolute leader in the digital space.