How Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are putting creators in focus

Earlier this year, Ray-Ban Meta launched the latest iteration of its smart glasses. Beyond introducing an expanded line of  frames in shades like Watermelon Red and Cinnamon Pink, the new product uses AI to clue the user in about the world around them.

That could mean identifying a dog breed, suggesting a recipe based on a snapshot of their fridge or using color theory to style their outfit. 

 “Ray-Ban is a fashion icon, and by teaming up, we’re able to offer the innovation people expect from Meta in a sleek, timeless design,” said Shachar Scott, VP of marketing for Meta Reality Labs, who said partnering with creators was vital to “really show how useful they can be.” 

Ray-Ban Meta is still rolling out creator collaborations for its “Live All In” social campaign, which the brand launched in April in partnership with creative agency SpecialGuest.

When approaching the work, the SpecialGuest team considered who a consumer would actually trust with a recommendation for an unknown and potentially daunting product.  If it couldn’t be their “best friend in the world,” said ECD and co-founder Aaron Duffy, the team would try to get pretty close by partnering with creators who actually engage with their audience. 

Ray-Ban Meta and SpecialGuest were focused on finding creators who were already making content that this product could naturally boost, and prioritized their creative direction from the start. 
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“The ideal scenario is that they create work that they would’ve created anyway, even if we weren’t paying them to do it,” said Duffy, adding that this was a “main success metric” throughout the campaign. 

Recruiting the right talent

Jo Gennett, lead creative director at SpecialGuest, said her team was avoiding the “post and ghost” creator when reaching out to talent. Instead of finding creators who simply promote a product to their followers and then go dark, she looked for people who had followers that turned to them for more than just a service, and seemed interested in their growth.  

Gennett pointed to her work with Garbo Zhu, a pottery creator who  mentioned in one video that she was thinking of branching out and starting a jewelry line. Since that post, many comments to follow were from followers looking for an update on that idea. ‍

After vetting for that audience love, the team moved to the technical side and made sure creators had a “real reason” to use the glasses.  The team wanted to give creators a front seat in ideation, and approached every creator only after doing thorough research into their content.

“If there’s a 10 minute YouTube vlog they posted last week, we’re watching that, picking out what they bought at the supermarket and mentioning it to them,” she said. “We want to make a point to tell creators ‘We like when you do these transitions’ and point to specifically what we came to them for.” 

Assuring creator alignment 

Throughout each iteration of the campaign, SpecialGuest learned that the best way to honor a creator’s regularly-scheduled content was to ask them how they want to approach the brief from the start, and then presenting that idea to the client. 

“We’re collaborating with creators first and then presenting to clients and saying ‘You’re excited about this creator, and this is how they want to approach the work,” said senior account director Maaren Hall. “We don’t want to have folks that are pigeonholed into doing a brand deal on something that just doesn’t feel comfortable.”

Avoiding insincere AI integration ‍

Scott stressed that recruiting creators was a necessary element of showing that the glasses were actually created to make life easier. Throughout the project, the team grounded this campaign  in the question, “Is this natural, or are we just doing it for the sake of it?” 

“The low-hanging fruit in the creator space is this overly-scripted, ‘I’m just shoehorning AI in because I have to talk about it,’" said Hall. "That's what we try to avoid in the work.”