Hollywood was among the first advertising adopters of Snapchat’s branded geofilters, with The Peanuts Movie, Deadpool and others all buying into it in an effort to sell those movies to a young, hip and creative audience. Last week Snapchat announced it had made these available to just about everyone in a self-service model that costs as little as $5, though prices vary depending on the details. While there are certain to be ways Snapchat won’t let studios circumvent the system to avoid paying for pricier ads there *are* ways they can work with theaters to take advantage of this new option.

snapchat tongue out

 

Let’s just use an example of, say, 10 Cloverfield Lane. Imagine Paramount went to a theater chain – for the sake of argument we’ll use AMC – and said it would reimburse the chain to buy new on-demand in select markets, say five theaters in each city. So the AMC on Chicago’s north side could create its own filter that was custom to that location and included both AMC and 10CL branding in some manner.

What you get then is something that’s much more localized – and hopefully more relevant – than what the studio as a whole might be using.

Now again, I’m sure there are ways Snapchat wants to make sure it’s getting $100 in one lump payment as opposed to $10 from a half-dozen different sources. But if it’s possible to do so it would be smart, I feel, for studios to look into this or some other way to localize geofilters more effectively. I’m sure there’s someone at these theater chains who’s a Snapchat user and can help with this sort of effort, even if it’s not something that can come down directly from corporate.