The Battle for the Camera
All eyes are on the camera. Last week Facebook took the stage at F8 to launch the Camera Effects platform in an effort to get developers to help it dominate Snapchat.
Camera Effects is an augmented reality platform that lets developers add augmented reality overlays to people, table tops and anything else that can be viewed through the lens of a camera. The potential is huge with the ability to play AR games (think Pokemon Go to the next level), tag AR pieces in the world for friends to find, leverage object recognition, do 3D mapping and so on. Facebook is giving developers tools turn Facebook Camera into the the best way to create and share with friends.
Why would Facebook do this? Well, the camera is Snapchat’s game. It does after all call itself a camera company, and not to be outdone, it launched World Lenses that allow users to add virtual, augmented reality objects to landscapes and the world around them. What Snapchat did for the selfie, it aims to do for the world.
The Camera Clash
Platforms are only as good as the content that is shared on them. The reason users continually log into Facebook, open Instagram and check Snapchat is because there’s content from their peers waiting for them. Users produce the content their friends and followers are so addicted to. If the content becomes stale or old, there’s nothing to come back for.
Facebook has dealt in the past with context collapse—the challenge that its users were creating less content and simply becoming consumers of it. It’s aimed to fix this with friend anniversaries and birthday videos, but the fact that users have so many places to share content is a concern. They need reasons and means to create. Sharing needs to be fun.
Snapchat made content sharing unique and fun. That’s what led to its instant success. People hadn’t been able share like that before. Now, Snapchat’s not the only game in town when it comes to fun ways of sharing. Facebook aims to give it some serious competition, even if it means copying most of Snapchat’s features.
These two have picked their battle, and it’s going to be over the camera. Facebook’s approach is to leverage innovation from the development community, while Snapchat’s seems to be emphasizing quality and usability. Because Facebook’s largely getting started in this area, it’s unclear how its approach will truly unfold. After all, Facebook’s apps are already bloated with features, and Snapchat’s access to the camera is front-and-center and more intuitive than ever thanks to a redesign.
For marketers, this means watching the platforms and more importantly how users share on them. It’s there, at the point of understanding consumer behavior, where marketers will find the role their brands can play with the camera, no matter the platform.