If you think you already have enough places online where you can buy your movie tickets, prepare yourself, because there’s a, albeit brief, new way to access tickets for a new movie you may want to see in the theater: Snapchat.
The mobile messaging app has partnered with Twentieth Century Fox, and, according to Variety, will let users buy tickets for this weekend’s X-Men: Apocalypse through Snapchat. The campaign is running from May 13 through May 26, the day before the film opens, in the United States. The tickets are accessible when Snapchat users watch the X-Men video ads on the service and then swipe up on their mobile screens. They can then buy tickets for the movie from either MovieTickets.com or Fandango. The ads can be seen in multiple channels in the Snapchat Discover section. This is the first movie-ticketing program for the service. Twentieth Century Fox has also partnered with the service to allow users to transform themselves into nine different characters from X-Men: Apocalypse with the app's Snapchat Lenses program for 24 hours on May 23.
For those of you who aren’t up on your knowledge of all the latest in mobile apps, Snapchat is a messaging application that specializes in letting its users share what the app deems "moments." You take a video or photo, add your caption or a doodle to it and then either send it to a friend or add it to your Story on the app to share with all of your friends on the service. Your friends are able to view these Snaps for up to 10 seconds, and then the content disappears. The ticket purchase ad experience is the latest example of the interactive full-screen ads that the company has been working with over the last month. They’ve also run shopping enabled ads for makeup brand Lancome and Target.
The addition of this marketing strategy to the plan for X-Men: Apocalypse actually makes a lot of sense. Snapchat is most popular with millenials, a group of youngsters known for their short attention spans and dislike of anything that takes more than a few minutes to deal with. We’ve recently been exposed to the "trailer trailer," a three to five second teaser trailer attached to the beginning of standard length movie trailers for the same reason, since it seems the same group of youths can’t be bothered to stop scrolling through their Facebook feeds for more than a few seconds when they see a trailer. Obviously, the folks behind the marketing of X-Men: Apocalypse know that young people like to spend money and want to do it as easily as possible, so hitting them up on a mobile app they’re already using in droves to get them to buy tickets seems like a smart way to go.
Will you be buying tickets for X-Men: Apocalypse on Snapchat this week? Or are you going to do it the geezer way and wait until you get to the theater? Let us know in the comments.
