The fashion industry’s solution to the perplexity that building hype during the fashion week season presents, made international headlines when two global players deployed digital out of home to make fashion week shoppable for their customers. In the second of our Ocean Talks, our luxury and fashion expert Sally Deane discusses these groundbreaking campaigns.
Leading the charge to democratising fashion in a live, mainstream environment were Topshop and Twitter with their #Livetrends collaboration across Ocean’s full motion screens.
Often, by the time Fashion Week collections arrive in the stores, the discerning shopper has moved on to the next seasonal trend.
But by making London Fashion Week accessible to consumers as it actually unfolded, it allowed Topshop’s customers to snap up the styles, colours and designs available immediately, in-store or online, rather than having to wait six months for a limited number of new products to hit the shop floor.
Powered by Twitter’s listening ear, Topshop allowed their global customers to shop for LFW trends as and when they happened, by pairing the emerging trends with shoppable items from the retailer, as well as giving them insight and access to the exclusive runway shows. Integrating social media and digital out of home advertising on this scale proved to be a powerful combination.
Digital out of home is a brilliantly high impact and creative medium because it can reach a burgeoning young fashion consumer at a key moment that is both inherently social and ripe for conversion – when they are out and about shopping with their friends.
Luxury British brand Hunter played a similar hand, live streaming its London Fashion Week show across the UK’s full motion network, The Grid, showcasing the Hunter Original pieces already in store, addressing the challenge to drive sales six months ahead of the collection arriving in the shops.
Live streaming their London Fashion Week show allowed Hunter to take the exclusive catwalk experience to a broader national audience and to share in what would usually be a ‘behind closed doors’ event. The show was also streamed globally on all online platforms for a seamless digital campaign.
Hunter also took over the sponsorship of Ocean’s Wi-Fi network throughout the campaign at each of the Wi-Fi enabled screens to facilitate the second screen experience and drive the audience to their fully mobile-responsive e-commerce site. Linking everything to mobile means awareness and engagement is never more than one swipe away from converting to purchase, wherever the customers are.
Innovation in digital formats across all screens from mobile and digital out of home to TV is really shifting up a gear now, in this case taking fashion directly from the glamour of the runways to the mainstream consumer as it happens.
The idea of live advertising in digital out of home is really beginning to open up. The opportunities are endless and for the always-on connected customer, it’s frankly what they expect. Here. Now.