My Augmented Addiction

I’ve revived my six-year-old blog having been buried in the trenches of living a corporate digital innovation career. I’ve spent my silence more than doubling my sentence in the digital experience realm (it’s not a jail, I’m still as obsessed as I was when I discovered ICQ in ’99) and in a sporadic visit to this content I realized how fascinating it is to see how, well, things haven’t really changed…

In 2010 I posted about Topshop’s virtual try on tool. Who would’ve imagined the first brand to embark in virtual try-on for beauty would be a UK high-street fashion brand? One key lesson I’ve learned in my career is “don’t be the first, be the best.” and sometimes being first-to-market is a short-term gain. Since Topshop, who I will guess dropped their tool due to low adoption rate, poorly measurable ROI which may have resulted in un-justifiable license fees from Taaz, a string of beauty brands have adopted facial recognition technology and received masses of publicity over it (I’m looking at you, L’Oreal). What is most fascinating to me is that the consumer adoption has only begun to take off now, in 2016… six YEARS since Topshop. Note: when I say take off I mean beyond the Gen Z and Millennials. Thank you, Snapchat and MSQRD. You know it’s something for keeps when Mark Zucks gets in the action. What’s the bet Facebook will integrate MSQRD tech into the Facebook platform soon? I digress…

Back to the beauty boat. I wanted to blog this because I have spent the past 24 months of my career in concept, pitching, scraping budget, planning and finally launching a facial recognition app for my current brand (you can download it here). It’s my augmented addiction and a slight passion project because I believe it’s the future of immersive digital experience. While my app isn’t the traditional “Try on” approach, I wanted to take the technology a different route because my feeling is that while try on is fun and snapchat geo-lens can make you look like you’re a perfect 10, it’s purely instant gratification vs value. More of a marketing approach than a service tool. I feel facial recognition can be used for so much more. I really wanted to expand its value as a teaching tool. My original pitch was to a makeup brand, but it didn’t work out, so skincare is where it lives for now. As a concept, facial recognition technology as a teaching tool has so much potential and I know this will be a valuable tech investment if a company really got behind it.

Sephora’s pocket contour class is the closest yet – I hope they don’t stop there. This is the closest to bricks-to-clicks experience we have and I’m so excited to see it evolve and honored to be a part of it.