When David Rose was planning how to ask his girlfriend to prom, he thought of Snapchat.
Like most teenagers, the 17-year-old resident of Lakeland, Florida was already a heavy Snapchat user.
"I had recently gotten into Photoshop and had made a [Snapchat] geofilter for my school," he told Tech Insider. With the help of an artist friend, Rose made a filter to announce his prom date in Snapchat, geofenced it to the bakery where he planned to ask her, and paid Snapchat $5 to display it in the app for a few hours.
After the shop brought out a cake with "PROM?" written on it, Rose and his girlfriend used the geofilter to document the moment and share it on their Snapchat stories. Everything they shared, including the filter Rose paid for, disappeared in the app after 24 hours.
“The whole thing probably took me about 30 minutes to make, "he said. "She loved it."
Not just for businesses
For the non-initiated, Snapchat geofilters are location-based graphics that the app's more than 100 million users can place over their photos and videos. These geofilters started out as ways to let other Snapchatters know if you were in a certain city or neighborhood. Then Snapchat started letting brands pay to sponsor geofilters around specific locations and events, like Coachella or New York Fashion Week.
Now Snapchat lets anyone pay to place their own "on-demand" geofilter in the app. They can be set to work around a specific address or up to a few city blocks. They range in price depending on the area and time of day, but they can cost as little as $5.
Creating one for your local bakery costs dramatically less than, say, blanketing Times Square as a company.
The obvious appeal is for businesses looking to promote an event — a potentially lucrative source of revenue for Snapchat. The company told Tech Insider that around 60% of on-demand geofilters are indeed purchased by businesses.
But the remaining 40% includes Snapchatters like Rose who are using their own geofilters to personalize the way they use the app.
A new trend
Geofilters aren't just being used for celebratory occasions; they can also serve as a clever way to get noticed.
Take Graham Allgood, a junior in college who created a mini job application with a Snapchat geofilter. He geofenced it around the office of his prospective employer, an ad agency, so that anyone inside would see it whenever they used Snapchat. The creative tactic won him an interview.
"I could’ve run an ad campaign through Twitter and they probably wouldn’t have noticed," Allgood told Business Insider. "I think the interactive way to do the marketing for this resume is the only reason it worked so well."
While savvy Snapchatters like Allgood may already be making custom geofilters, the phenomenon has yet to go mainstream. Snapchat has done little promotion for its on-demand geofilter tool since it launched in February, and for now its existence appears to be spreading organically. People see someone's geofilter in the app and then want to make their own.
For instance, Rebecca Navarre didn't realize that Snapchat let people create custom geofilters until she and a friend recently passed by a stranger's wedding one day and noticed a filter for it in the app.
“Then we knew it was a thing," she told TI.
Using her knowledge of Adobe Illustrator, the 24-year-old decided to make a geofilter for her friend's engagement party and paid less than $10 for it to appear in the app at the party for a few hours. She said the geofilter was approved by Snapchat in less than a day after it was submitted through the company's website.
“Every picture that was taken that night was in Snapchat," Navarre said. "She was really exited about it.”
Although Navarre has since made a couple of custom geofilters, she said that her friends are still surprised when they them in the app. "People are just realizing it’s a thing you can do," she said.
Regardless of the early novelty factor, Navarre expects to keep making her own Snapchat filters to celebrate special occasions, like weddings and birthday parties. “Every event we have will probably have a filter now."
