Lightship Templates Challenge

Lenslist x Niantic

In June 2022 we released our first challenge with a brand new partner Niantic, known as the maker of the most popular AR game Pokémon GO. Only a few months ahead of our challenge Niantic released their own toolset for building the real-world metaverse, offering some of the best world-mapping, semantic segmentation, and shared AR feature sets, called Lightship. Our task was to incentivize our Creators’ Community to download it, try it, utilize templates prepared by the Niantic team and of course take part in the challenge.

quick recap

118

No. of Submissions

Creators, who submitted

No. of Prizes

$45,000

Prize Pool

37 countries

Reach & Diversity

Briefing Period

Creative Brief and Custom Landing Page

Ahead of launching the challenge, we worked with our partner to come up with a creative brief that would not only inform, but also inspire our community to take part in the challenge.

Each and every challenge we host, has a custom landing page (not a branded template), designed to communicate our partner’s mission and image, combined with our voice, the community knows so well.

On top of the LP, we also built a custom registration and submission form, adjusted to the know-how needs of our partner and in accordance with GDPR security and privacy standards, with data hosted on our own servers.

Last, but not least – as the challenge Organizer, we come up with Terms and Conditions together with our legal team and based on our multiyear expertise. Without this document, no challenge can be launched or conducted!

Submission Period

Outreach Campaign

With the submission period lasting only 3 weeks and thousands of people in our AR Community to reach, we had to up our communication to the highest levels. The channels we used:

Lenslist Socials

Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Discord – with more than 35k friends, followers or members on board.

Our Mailing List

Probably the most comprehensive AR yellow pages existing.

Social Media DMs

Direct and not automatized communication is the key to connecting with our community.

Research & Outreach

We also conducted a research & outreach campaign targeted at Unity developers and C# coders.

On top of that, we conducted a research & outreach campaign targeted at Unity developers and C# coders.

The Results & Selection Period

After 6 weeks we received 118 submissions – which was a big success considering how new and how complex of a toolset Lightship is.

The most impactful result here was that all 78 Creators and Developers who took part in the challenge, learned lots and tried the templates prepared especially for this activation. See our top picks below.

Once the winners are selected, we start the prize fulfillment process right away. With all the necessary paperwork needed to be signed to transfer the prize money to all different countries, with a data validation piece on top, this process takes a couple of weeks, but considering our experience in the field, we take care of the process from start to finish with no unnecessary issues or delays.

Final Thoughts

This challenge was not easy for our Creators, who mostly use low-code solutions and VPL when creating their AR experiences, but we’re very happy with the result and also with the huge amount of quality content that was produced with our partners at Niantic for and during the activation. Congrats again to all the winners and big thank you to all the participants and of course our friends at Niantic for teaming up with us on this one. Thanks!

This challenge proves that this format can work for all types of innovative brands. Why?

Hundreds of Creators developing AR experiences within your brand’s image, mission or campaign means thousands of people create content using these effects at the same time = more visibility, organic reach and brand awareness;

AR Community is ready to come up with high quality content, creative designs and well-developed 3D models (see the winners!);

You can license AR experiences you like most = wide spread of inspired work to choose from instead of 2 or 3 creative proposals from your agency;

AR Creators are social media influencers of creative spaces online and have global reach – the average followers count of an AR Creator is ~30k.

Boosting the innovative, creative and collaborative image of your brand = checking off all three most valuable tenets of web3/metaverse marketing approach.