What Snapchat’s SPECS Launch Means for Brands.

Snap put SPECS on pre-order on 16 September at $2,195, with shipping expected later this autumn in the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

The glasses are priced, dated and on sale, which changes the question for a brand social team from “will this happen” to “what, if anything, should we do about it”.

Our answer is very little this quarter, and one specific thing.

What Snap announced

The facts from Snap’s newsroom post of 16 September, and nothing beyond them:

• SPECS cost $2,195 with a $200 refundable deposit, pre-ordered at SPECS.com. A bundle with a Connected Case, which adds four charges and cellular connectivity, is $2,395.
• Shipping is expected to begin later this autumn in the US, UK and France. No date has been given.
• The glasses are a standalone computer with see-through lenses. The hardware sits in the frames, with no puck and no tether, and the operating system takes hand and voice input.
• Data plans are $10 a month for Verizon customers and $20 a month for everyone else in the US. Orange in France and EE in the UK are the named carriers, with their pricing still to come.
• A SPECS First Look opens at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles on 1 October, where people can try the glasses in person.

What Snap did not say is just as useful. There is no shipping date beyond the season, no UK or French plan pricing, no weight, battery or field of view figure, and no sales expectation.

Snapchat has been redesigned for the glasses

The part that matters most to a social team is that Snapchat itself now runs on SPECS. Snap says a snap of the fingers takes a Snap, and a video call runs hands-free.

That is a new capture surface for an app that 493 million people used every day in the second quarter, by Snap’s own figures.

Nothing changes about how Stories, Spotlight or Public Profiles work for a brand today. The feed is the same feed. What changes over time is where some of the content comes from. A Snap taken on glasses looks different from one taken on a phone: first person, hands in frame, no screen between the person and the moment.

The launch Lenses tell you what Snap thinks the glasses are for

Snap named the launch experiences, and the list reads like a brief:

• Basketball training built with the NBA and WNBA
• A Harry Potter Lens with HBO Max, ahead of the series premiering at Christmas
• Spotify music and podcast recommendations by voice
• Restaurant and landmark discovery with Tripadvisor
• Shopping through the Shopify catalogue, where a product is placed at full scale in a room and bought on the retailer’s own site
• Golf, football skills, chess, table tennis, an Apollo 11 lesson and a star map

Sport, entertainment, music, travel and retail. Every one of them is something you do with your hands or your feet, not something you scroll. That is the shape of the opportunity, and it is not a shape most brand content teams are built for.

Lens Studio is still the way in

Snap said Lens creation continues through Lens Studio, the same tool behind the Lenses on Snapchat today. There is no separate SPECS programme a brand has to apply to.

That is the practical point of the whole launch for a social team. If your brand has ever shipped a Snapchat Lens, the pipeline onto the glasses is the pipeline you already have. If it has not, the first Lens you build for the phone is the one that teaches you whether you want to build for the glasses at all.

What we would do this quarter

We would not build for SPECS yet, and we would say so to anyone who asks. Snap has given no sales expectation, the glasses cost as much as a laptop, and the first pairs ship to three countries in a season with no date attached. A brand that spends its autumn on a SPECS experience is building for an audience that does not exist yet.

We would do three things instead.

1. Find out whether your existing Snapchat Lenses have an owner. Most brands that ran a Lens two years ago cannot name the person who could open the project file today.
2. Check whether anyone on the team has opened Lens Studio this year. If the answer is no, that is the skills gap, and it is cheaper to close on the phone than on the glasses.
3. Get the phone product right first. A brand that can plan a month of Snapchat content and keep to it, cut for the difference between Stories and Spotlight, is the brand that will be ready when there is an audience on the glasses.

The privacy line, and why it matters to a brand

Snap says SPECS use no facial recognition, do not record continuously, and show an external light when they are recording. SPECS Intelligence, the AI service that runs across iPhone, Mac and the glasses, connects only to the apps a person chooses, and Snap says that connected content is not used to train its models or to serve personalised ads.

For a brand, that is the answer to the first question a comms team will ask: nobody gets filmed without a light on. Anyone aged 18 or over in the US has been able to download the SPECS app for iOS since 16 September and try a preview of the assistant, so the software is testable before the hardware ships.

How NBK thinks about SPECS

Our experience running Snapchat Shows for publishers taught us that format-native execution beats a repurposed asset every time. The same rule applies here in an extreme form. A Lens built for glasses is a piece of software, not a post. It needs an owner, a budget line and a maintenance plan, which makes it an operations question before it is a creative one.

Our position is that the glasses change nothing about the discipline and a great deal about the ceiling. The discipline is the same as it is on the phone: a rhythm the team can hold, one standard applied to every piece, someone reading the numbers each week. The ceiling rises when a brand can put a product in a room at full scale and let a person buy it on the spot, which is what the Shopify integration does on day one.

Next step

If your Snapchat output is running on habit rather than a plan, the glasses are not the problem to solve first. NBK’s social audits and strategy service starts with what the channel is doing today, before anything new is added to it.