Snapchat Lens - Potato

"Potato Boss" and the lens that broke the Internet

Info

Created: 11/16/2019 (Updated 3/7/2020) \ Platform: Snapchat Creator: Phil Walton (@phillip.walton) Software: Maya, Photoshop, Substance Painter, Lens Studio [Lens Link](https://www.snapchat.com/unlock/?type=SNAPCODE&uuid= de4333d8e418462bb5319b9fefca76ae&metadata=01)

History

Potato was always a popular lens, surpassing my previous success of other similarly styled lenses in a matter of a month or two. It was in wide use on Snapchat and featured in several viral TikTok videos. Views were already in the hundreds of millions before it made the news.

Going Viral

On March 30, in the midst of the world-wide lockdown for Covid-19, video meetings on services like Zoom were in wide use. A woman using Snap Camera and the Potato lens went viral on twitter and was reshared nearly a million times. Articles about the tweet showed up in news sites across the internet like BuzzFeed news, Huffpost, The Mirror, Time Magazine, Teen Vogue, Elle, ScreenRant, LAD Bible. It even became an answer on the NPR news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”

Results

In Snap, Inc.’s Q1-2020 Earnings Report, the company noted a more than a 30x increase in the daily downloads of Snap Camera. We attribute this to be in part due to the viral success of the “Potato Boss” story and Potato lens– a conclusion supported by the data of a current total lens play time use of almost 88 years in Snap Camera.