Its stock took a beating, plummeting from an all-time high of $83.11 last September to $11.91 in mid-June. Snap’s Live Nation partnership comes at a pivotal time for the tech company, which in May announced it would likely miss its second-quarter targets for revenue and adjusted profit. (Patrick Dentler, director of marketing for C3 Presents, says the festival wants to integrate AR features while ensuring fans aren’t glued to their phones, which is why most of Lollapalooza’s AR offerings are utility-based.) Snapchat will offer four features at the Chicago staple: AR Compass, which works even without cellular connectivity and uses GPS wayfinding to show an interactive 3D map (for sustainability reasons, Lollapalooza ended its paper programs) Friend FindAR, now out of beta Festival Planner, which lets fans note must-see sets and share custom schedules and Lollaland, where the purple robot and hot dog live, contained within the Chicagoland area over the festival weekend by geofencing. More than a dozen festivals are on deck for Live Nation and Snap, with Lollapalooza up next.
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It was a full-circle moment for Snapchat and Live Nation, which had first teamed up for a one-off partnership at EDC in 2014 - when, as Chernett recalls with a laugh, “I got a call that there was this company trying to get into EDC for free to test this closed-circuit communications system that no one had ever heard of.” (Snapchat did, in fact, get in - and subsequently tested the platform’s first-ever Our Story, a user-populated reel of Snaps, at the festival.) Snapchat’s AR technology will enhance fans’ concert experience with tools including Friend FindAR, a way to locate others among the masses. One Snapchat Lens showed neon-colored daisies sprouting from the ground, while more practical tools included the interactive map AR Compass and the Friend FindAR Lens, launched at EDC in beta, which helps fans pinpoint their relative location from friends using visual aids like rainbow-lit AR pathways. As promised, the partnership showed how AR could make festivals more fun, but also more navigable for attendees. In May, the two companies unveiled the partnership at Las Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival, promoted by Live Nation subsidiary Insomniac. This April, at the annual Snap Partner Summit, Live Nation and Snap announced they had signed a four-year deal to bring custom AR to festivals and concerts, with help from Snap’s creative studio Arcadia, which launched last October. If you look at AR interaction, there’s no other platform that’s even close.” (Seventy-five percent of Snapchat’s 347 million daily active users across 20 countries are ages 13-34.) “There really was no other platform to turn to. You have 250 million daily users, I have basically zero,’ ” says Chernett. “I was like, ‘We need to do this with you.
So, last July, he reached out to Ben Schwerin, Snap’s senior vp of content and partnerships. “It was just so obvious to me I’ve got to go where the fans are and not necessarily rely on the fans to discover these things on their own,” says Chernett. The same year, at Atlanta’s Music Midtown festival, Live Nation offered a second AR experience, this time through the festival’s own app, and a similar issue arose. The only problem? Such experiential enhancements could only be accessed through a pre-installed app fans had to download - which served no purpose after that show. “I was standing there like, ‘Only the people here get this,’ and I like that,” says Chernett. The dance act had partnered with Verizon to offer AR experiences such as live filters and photo opportunities. Kevin Chernett, Live Nation’s executive vp of global content partnerships and innovation, recalls his “aha” moment with bringing AR to live music in 2019 during a concert with The Chainsmokers. Its new, multiyear partnership with concert giant Live Nation, the parent company of Lollapalooza promoter C3 Presents, will surely help. Now, as startups and tech giants alike are increasingly using AR, Snap wants to position itself as the company best suited to bring it to concerts. Since 2013, when Snapchat debuted Lenses - which let users apply AR filters over photos and videos - the company has developed AR technology for both utility and entertainment. Technology showing things on a screen that aren’t there in real life is augmented reality, an area of innovation that Snapchat and its parent company, Snap Inc., have quietly dominated for years. Snap Partners with Live Nation to Bring AR Experiences to Festivals