20th Century Fox is taking over all of the Snapchat lenses to promote X-Men: Apocalypse: https://t.co/oYNCYvrYi0 pic.twitter.com/kKdO8XpKx4
— ADWEEK (@Adweek) May 23, 2016
X-Men: Apocalypse isn’t just content with taking over your movie screens. It’s also engaging in some fun viral social media marketing, no doubt to pull in the youngins, by offering — count ’em -—NINE filters on Snapchat that can make you into your favorite x-man or woman. Marketing genius, right?
Oh, if only things were that simple.
The X-Men people paying for so many filters somehow meant that the regular filters, like the ones where you can turn your face into a dog, and even worse, the Coachella flower crown filter, are no more. BuzzFeed caught onto this after many Snapchatters irately took to Twitter to express their displeasure about this change.
Here are some of the upset tweets:
the snapchat filters are all trash now 🙃
— Lex.✨💎 (@ayeeitsLEXXY) May 23, 2016
https://twitter.com/_halestorm/status/734868418357297153
https://twitter.com/JJ_Carter3/status/734832350371008512
People are really upset about losing the dog filter:
https://twitter.com/chriskurtzz/status/734868370315747328
WHY DID SNAPCHAT GET RID OF THE DOG FILTER IM LIVID
— em (@breathins) May 23, 2016
when snapchat only has X-men filters right now & you're tryna be a dog 😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😂
— K🌹 (@lovely_khandi) May 23, 2016
https://twitter.com/wthjaeza/status/734828456567930880
As someone who is at least 3 times hotter with the dog filter, I'm incensed by this as well https://t.co/xwidhNMNCC
— summer anne burton (@summeranne) May 23, 2016
And the flower crown one:
Lol xmen sponsored snapchat so all the filters lenses are xmen and everyone is freaking out bc the dog filter or flower filter arent there
— Julian (@ijulianrod7) May 23, 2016
snapchat replaced all the filters w xmen filters… I TOOOLLLDD them if they removed the flower crown I would rAAGGEEE
— sammyy 🌹✨ (@sxmmyyrxse) May 23, 2016
Some people are just confused:
https://twitter.com/kabrams12/status/734868089830047745
This one is perceptive:
https://twitter.com/slflmichael/status/734868341068795909
Good question. Best guess is that 20th Century Fox paid a lot of money because the X-Men Snapchat takeover also means that people can purchase tickets for the movie directly through the app, as Mashable reports. Since 60 percent of smartphone users ages 13 to 34 use Snapchat, this is a pretty good way to target that demographic.
Maybe Snapchat users don’t like being advertised to, but that’s eventually the way of all social media apps. Even that flower crown is a nice plug for the overly-commercialized Coachella. Plus, all publicity is good — how many of those tweets against the X-Men filters reminded others to go see the movie?
And you gotta admit — these filters look pretty cool.