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.

Topshop Digitalistas of Fashion

TopShop are innovators in the digital revolution of the fashion industry. They’ve installed digital technologies in-store to enhance their customer experience and created many digital programs to engage their audience, I’m always excited to see what’s next for the brand.

Some digital/social campaigns I’ve noted and enjoyed are:-

In-Store Virtual “fitting room”

Topshop set up a virtual fitting room in the form of a giant iPad its flagship store in Moscow. Using Microsoft Kinect mixed with augmented reality the virtual fitting room let shoppers try on clothes without needing to get undressed – what bliss for a girl!

The giant iPad had a built-in camera that recognised the human body and superimposes a 3D model of a garment which shoppers can switch to different ensembles using simple gestures, all powered by Kinect.

Watch the video to see how genius this concept is…

• Link-up with SCVNGR which they did in September 2011 for back-to-school. Students had to undergo challenges in-store with their mobile device to earn rewards such as shopping sprees and discounts.
• Pinterest x Topshop Digital Gift Guide always innovating the clicks-t0-bricks this was a great pilot for tapping into pinners during the holiday season. The digital screen synced to Pinterest in their NYC and London flagships to allow shoppers to build their wish list from stores. I personally wouldn’t want people watching my pinning habits but a great test!
• OOH Data-driven Billboards – To activate shoppers during fashion week Topshop invested in digital billboards across the UK connected to twitter to display real-time trends. A fantastic way to be real-time relevant and capitalize on all the FOMO of fashion week by giving people something to be part of.

…and of course, their virtual makeover tool which they used to launch their venture into cosmetics. My love for this is known by my previous blog post..

So what’s next for Sir Philip Green’s giant brand? My suggestion would be RFID technology in their fitting rooms. They’ve already install RFID tags in their clothes, so why not use this to go one-step further and link it to their fitting rooms.

A company that has innovated this technology is DDB Singapore with a Musical Fitting Room. The idea from DDB Singapore was to create state-of-the-art fitting rooms at fashion stores because they say  “The youth define themselves by the type of music they listen to and by the clothes they wear.” Taking that insight, DDB combined music and fashion – two things I’ve always felt go hand-in-hand and both are very powerful forms of self-expression for the youth – so snap it up Phil! Before Urban Outfitters do…!

Interactive Flash Merchandising

Anyone who manages an e-commerce website will (or should!) always be looking for ways to improve conversion rates from the homepage. For fashion brands this will be no exception. Each season fashion marketers work with creative teams or agencies to produce glorious campaign imagery or videos to support the new collection or season theme. Often a majority of the images or videos created for collection campaigns aren’t ever or rarely seen by the customer and so become unappreciated.

Ecommerce managers strive to find ways to quicken the visitor process from the website homepage to product to purchase and checkout. There are a growing number of solutions to help this, such as ‘quick buy’ and deep linking, but a new method that is surely to become more and more popular is called flash merchandising.

So what is it? Flash merchandising is a unique tool that combines flash media and ‘quick buy’ functionality. Think about any flash websites you have seen or flash videos you have watched, have you ever been able to purchase directly from them? likely not! until now…

Now we can create rich collection campaigns in the form of videos and imagery and allow viewers to purchase directly through the material they’re viewing, so there is less need to visit the product detail page. A website that uses this technology is Tesco Clothing who use flash merchandising on their homepage and allow visitors to  click directly onto a product embedded into a flash panel and purchase from it without navigating from the homepage. See below.

In the above example you can see how Tesco Clothing use flash merchandising to promote World Cup sales and allow visitors to buy featured products from the homepage. Needless to say, this technology is doing wonders for increasing homepage conversion rates.

Its something I think will work wonders for enhancing fashion campaigns online. Its an opportunity to engage customers even more into online media and really maximise ROI. With this technology marketers should ask themselves; why continue to spend enormous budgets on producing campaigns without a method to measure its success? Online marketeers constantly analyse every inch of their website, so now lets allow offline marketers the same opportunity.