Unless you live under a digital rock, you have most likely seen or been someone who has done one of these things in their social media posts in recent times: sported animated glasses or an eye patch à la the pirates, swapped their face with a teddy bear or the indomitable Kokilaben of the ‘Rasode mein kaun tha’ fame, opened their mouth and shot out sparkles and rainbows, or simply teleported themselves to the Swiss Alps while sitting at home counting the unending days of this pandemic.
Anyone can do this with a little help from augmented reality (AR) filters these days.
For the uninitiated, AR filters are computer-generated effects — available across major social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and the currently-banned TikTok — which you can superimpose on pictures, GIFs, or videos, and share with your social network.
AR filters have taken off in India in a big way in the last six months. Some techies are even calling them the future of video.
The craze for these fancy effects has led to the rise of an ecosystem consisting of 3-4 prominent companies, like AliveNow, Superfan Studio and The Intellify, and at least 100 individual creators who specialise in making these filters for commercial purposes.
From consumer-facing brands to movie production houses and OTT channels, to content creators and regular social media users, people are buying snazzy AR filters online with the same enthusiasm that you and I bought holiday tickets back in the pre-Covid days.
On one hand, AR filters have opened up a new world of opportunities for several stakeholders — social platforms, brands, coders and graphic designers.
At the same time, they have also sounded the alarm about deepfakes — audio-visual content manipulated and fabricated using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools — that can potentially wreak havoc on our socio-political structures at a time when we’re already battling with fake news and misinformation.
ARewind
To understand the AR filter universe, it is critical to understand how one creates these CG effects you see on these apps in the first place.
Social networks have their own AR software development kits (SDK).
Think of SDK as an Adobe Photoshop-esque platform, except each company has its own exclusive version.
For example, Facebook and Instagram have an in-built platform called Spark AR Studio. Snapchat has what’s called Lens Studio. Anyone can use the tools on these platforms to create AR filters. The platform reviews every filter uploaded for use in order to weed out bad actors. The review process can take a few days to weeks.
More than 600 million people use AR effects across Facebook and Instagram every month, according to data available on Spark AR Studio. In the last three months, more than 150 accounts world over have seen their AR effects generate more than 1 billion views, the studio claims. Snapchat recently reported that 76% of its users engaged with the app’s augmented reality functionality every day in Q2 2020.
Read: India a key learning market for Snapchat: Snap Inc’s Eitan Pilipski
AR filters take off in India
By no means are AR filters new to the Indian digital landscape. Popular content creators have gotten into controversies for using face-swapping AR filters in their Snapchat videos back in 2016 and 2017 when Snapchat used to be the it thing for urban digital natives of India. (Turns out, India is still the second-largest market for the ephemeral messaging app with over 33 million users in the country as of July, as per data platform Statista’s latest report.)
What’s new then?
The sudden surge in advertiser interest.
AR filters have now caught the fancy of advertisers like PepsiCo, Mondelez, Vivo, and Swiggy, among others.
Until six months ago, only a handful of brands from India had dabbled in AR-led digital campaigns in the name of experimenting with yet another shiny tool.
“Since March, though, almost all popular brands have had at least one AR filter up on their social media page,” says Sandeep Rathod, a Mumbai-based AR marketing specialist.
The pandemic-induced lockdown may have inadvertently caused this sudden spike in interest.
As per a recent consumer behaviour study conducted by Facebook and Boston Consulting Group, people are looking to bring the outside experiences in-home as they increasingly spend time indoors amid the ongoing pandemic.
“Businesses are bridging this gap by building strong virtual experiences to replicate the in-person one, and AR is one of the most powerful ways in which they’ve been doing that,” a Facebook spokesperson tells us.
Neel Joshi from Ahmedabad has been getting queries from brands that are keen to create mask filters, for instance. The 23-year-old MBBS student makes AR filters for fun.
During the initial stages of the lockdown in India, Joshi uploaded an AR-led gamified filter on Instagram that was themed around Jethalal, a fictional character from popular Hindi TV sitcom Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah. “It has fetched 2.7 million views so far,” he says.
The popularity of the filter got him a few projects from the entertainment industry, too.
“When shoots were on hold, movie production houses were getting actors to promote their upcoming films by using AR filters that allow you to change the background of an existing video,” says Joshi.
AR filters provide brands with a unique way to engage with consumers and present them with brand-specific experiences, says Vineet Sharma, director – juices at PepsiCo India. Recently, the FMCG company’s juice brand Tropicana introduced an ‘Asli Meter’ AR filter to allow its consumers to celebrate their authenticity with their digital family. The AR campaign was created by tech creative studio AliveNow, a key player in the AR segment.
However, people don’t prefer using branded filters, notes Joshi, and suggests brands look at creating generic filters based on pop culture trends and rely on filter credits to gain user attention. Each AR filter carries the handle of the user who creates it.
The players & the monies
Joshi charges anywhere between Rs 40,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh per project depending on whether it’s for an AR game or filter.
Prominent tech companies in this space, like Superfan Studio and AliveNow, charge anywhere between $2,000 to $20,000 per project. They have international clients, too.
These two companies are also official partners for Facebook and Snapchat for all things AR filters. It means whenever the social networks release new features on their AR platforms, these firms get access to them before anyone else. It also means they work directly with these social media companies on branded AR projects.
A few weeks ago, Superfan Studio launched a B2C platform that allows influencers and content creators to directly create customised AR filters that they can share on their social accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. “Within two weeks of the launch, we had got 500 creators registered on the platform,” says Snehaal Dhruv, founder & CEO of Superfan Studio, who is targeting 100,000 creators onboard the platform by end of next year. The platform has introduced basic monthly and annual plans at $15 and $99 respectively.
The prominent players in the space believe B2C AR-filter platforms to form 60% of the market in India in the next couple of years. As per their estimates, there are at least 70,000 AR filter creators in India at present of which only 100 make them for commercial use. B2C platforms can simplify the filter-making process for the remaining 69,900 who are doing it for fun.
Rathod in Mumbai is bullish on the B2C prospects, too. “I get a lot of enquiries from people to create customised birthday and wedding filters. Independent professionals like chefs, influencers also use AR filters to increase interaction and engagement with their audience,” says the 24-year-old.
However, B2C will be a high volume but low-margin business, says Adhvith Dhuddu, founder & CEO of AliveNow, another marquee player in the AR space in India.
The remaining 40% will be in the B2B space where studios like Superfan and AliveNow will create customised AR filters for brands wanting to launch AR-related campaigns on social media. The B2B segment is a Rs 5 crore to Rs 10 crore market at present, as per digital media planners.
Widening scope of work
Right now, the marketing spends on AR filters on various social media platforms is in single-digit percentage of the total marketing budgets, says Heeru Dingra, CEO of digital agency WATConsult. “But it is safe to say, gauging by the way the trend is gaining momentum, that the frequency of AR campaigns is sure to increase in the near future,” he adds.
Some AR tech studios predict at least 15% of marketers’ overall budget may go into AR campaigns in two years time.
Shravan Rajpurohit, cofounder of AR/VR-focused studio, The Intellify, expects his income from AR filters to occupy 40% of the company’s overall revenue by next year. “This year it contributed to 15% of the revenue.” Based in Ahmedabad, The Intellify makes anywhere between Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 2 crore annually, Rajpurohit tells us.
Seeing that the AR filter business was picking up, he recently added “AR filters” keyword in his LinkedIn bio and also mentioned it on the company website.
Homegrown rivals to TikTok are also ramping up their AR capabilities and will open up more opportunities in the AR filters space for creative studios in 6-7 months, say creative studios. However, they will need to either build or buy AR software development kits first. Some, like Kiko TV, are working on building SDKs internally while the likes of Chingari have recently decided to buy the AR kit instead.
According to industry estimates, SDKs can be bought and integrated with platforms for a one-time fee of $0.5 million to $2 million.
AReality check
While many in the ecosystem are bullish on the scope of AR filters, some digital agency executives say they feel deepfakes will eventually overtake the AR space, engulfing the harmless filters in its wake. To prevent this to an extent, platforms like Facebook and Snapchat have enforced guidelines that do not allow real faces of people other than the creator to be used in creating face-filters. Joshi’s AR game featuring Jethalal’s character also uses the actor Dilip Joshi’s caricature and not his real facial image.
In fact, Facebook had briefly banned creators from using any face deforming features until it built a better reviewing mechanism, creators tell us.
Nonetheless, “as long as face-filters exist, deepfakes will, too. Among the many pros of AR filters, that’s the one major downside,” says Joshi.
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