Pinkfong Boosts Campaign with AR Effect and AR Ad

As more creators and brands turn to Augmented Reality Ads to promote their Spark AR effects, we’re seeing a lot of exciting results, and learning a ton about how creators and brands can get more exposure for their work using this new ad format. With this in mind, we’re sharing a story today from Smart Study, a South Korea-based education company that owns Pinkfong, the creators of the popular "Baby Shark” kids song — yes, that baby shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, song!

Earlier this year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pinkfong began developing a new public health campaign, and reworked their original Baby Shark song and video with new lyrics to help communicate a simple, but timely and important health message for kids — to wash their hands.

“Wash Your Hands with Baby Shark”
Created by Pinkfong

The Pinkfong creative team, which consisted of a marketer, project manager and a technical artist, also began building a new AR effect to help increase engagement with their campaign. Pinkfong’s new BabyShark effect, which used a combination of face tracking, segmentation and of course, music, was designed to make it simple and fun for parents and kids to try it out and join the #babysharkhandwashchallenge — which was already gaining traction among doctors, nurses and firefighters.

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BabyShark by @pinkfong_official

To help expand awareness for their campaign in certain target markets, Pinkfong created an AR Ad, which showed a short preview video of the effect in the Facebook mobile News Feed, and invited viewers to try it out, instantly, on their mobile device.

Pinkfong’s BabyShark AR Ad

“One of the pain points we face when running a social media challenge is how to make it easier for the public to participate, without having to edit their own videos. The AR ad we ran using our Spark AR effect is a great example of how we can overcome that barrier.“

One additional strategy the Pinkfong team used to aid with effect discovery and trial, was to create lightweight promotional videos which they organically shared on Instagram Feed and Stories. These videos helped guide first-time AR effect users to the Instagram effect tray where they could find and try the BabyShark effect.

Awareness of the BabyShark effect grew quickly in the first two months of the campaign, with over 350K AR captures and 7.5 million impressions across Facebook and Instagram.

And it only took two weeks to see the value and return of the AR ads — a campaign brand lift study showed a lift across ad recall (+6.3 pts), campaign awareness (+1.8pts) and action intent awareness (+1.8 pts, compared to the global education vertical average of 1.2 pts).

Lastly: participation in the #babysharkhandwashchallenge was incredibly strong, with nearly 92% of the challenge participants coming from the AR effect.

While creators and brands are still experimenting and finding ways to promote their effects, it’s clear Pinkfong had the ingredients — timeliness, a simple message, and a fun, accessible AR experience — to help make its #babysharkhandwashchallenge a success. If you’re interested in learning more about creating and publishing AR Ads using Spark AR, head over to Facebook for Business for some helpful tutorials.

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