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However, Facebook has assured Mc Hale this will change over time.“The reason I decided to do it [the AR campaign] with Facebook was the pure reach and scale of its platform,” Mc Hale said.Two days after it launched, the filter had been used over 26,000 times, said Jamie Mc Hale, the digital marketing manager at Studio Canal.That number is as much as Mc Hale and his team know about how the filter is being used, as Facebook has limited the metrics it shares with them.

The recruitment pitch started three months ago, when a group of 30 advertisers and agencies, including Nike, Studio Canal and TSB, were given access to a closed beta program to create AR campaigns.

Tom Winbow, the strategy director at Ralph, said what he has seen of Facebook’s AR features has left him “cold”; Facebook is an “incredibly cost-effective” way to get both mass reach and engagement, but it’s “just not very fun.” Snapchat is where users naturally live through a lens and, therefore, is “still the most fun place for AR” when it comes to social experiences, Winbow said.

The biggest difference so far between Facebook’s AR pitch and Snapchat’s is that the latter is essentially a closed ecosystem.

Agencies, however, aren’t threatened by Facebook going directly to their clients, as it has asked to be kept updated on the brands already being pitched AR campaigns to avoid doubling up.

To date, anecdotal evidence on the performance of AR campaigns has been mixed.