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The term “omnichannel” has been used by marketers for several years in reference to offering a unified experience to customers, regardless of the channel which they use to interact with the brand. The main challenge for brands is bridging the gap between their real life experiences and their digital offering. The real life experiences can include retail stores, exhibitions, popups and other events.
Brands have experimented with a range of technologies to give their customers access to physical spaces in a digital format through 360 videos, “Google map” walkthrough style virtual reality stores as well as experiences in the Metaverse. An example of a virtual store is here from Dior https://virtualstore.dior.com/dior-vibe/#/en_ee/ These experiences are of course innovative and amazing for specific campaigns, but also costly and lengthy to create and not always easily accessible to all customers.
One of the most powerful ways of storytelling is of course video. In parallel to experimenting with fully digitised experiences, brands are taking advantage of video and supercharging it with shoppable and interactive video technologies to create immersive online experiences that provide a window to their real life spaces. There have been a range of approaches to achieve this and we have compiled some of the great examples below.
Brown Thomas, the leading Irish department store, created a beautiful interactive drone flythrough film from their Dublin store. A drone with a simple camera was flown through the department store after hours to showcase all the featured brands and different departments. As the drone flies through the space, the viewer can click on the areas of the video to see more details about the departments, brands and event selected products. Viewers were also able to then click through to relevant sections of the site directly from the video. The interactive video itself was embedded on the Brown Thomas website and offered their online customers a brilliant way to get a feel for the store.
Jacquemus used an interactive video platform to bring the 24/24 pop-up store experience to life online. The ephemeral space was open 24/7 for three days during Milan Fashion Week and situated in the Palazzo Clerici, a former practician family’s grand residence in the city Duomo’s district. The shoppable video documented the beautiful white interior of the pop-up, complete with vending machine walls and containing the latest Jacquemus products in white. By using interactive technology, Jacquemus made their pop-up event accessible for all customers on their eCommerce homepage. Consumers could click to view a product and add it straight to their cart from the immersive, digital experience. The brand exemplified a fresh and creative approach to bringing the in-person retail experience online and explored the possibilities for leveraging customer purchases from every outlet.
The British Fashion council partnered with Smartzer as part of their efforts to digitise London Fashion Week in 2020. A summary video of all the shows from each day of the fashion week was created. These videos were made interactive in a way where viewers were able to discover more about each of the featured designers by clicking on different sections of the video and to link to their profiles across the London Fashion Week website. This concept enabled the British Fashion Council to offer an interactive and educational way for anyone to access the London Fashion Week shows in a fun, immersive and easy way. The interactive video experience was also used to provide easy navigation across the site from inspirational event videos to designer profile pages.
Ralph Lauren used a shoppable video to replicate the ultimate in-store retail experience online. Betty Wang, the VP of Fashion Concierge at Farfetch joined Robin Steiner, the iconic fashion editor and brand consultant to create a tour of the new Ralph Lauren flagship store in Milan. The video featured all of the beautifully curated departments and the iconic restaurant, Polo Bar. During this immersive and shoppable styling experience, Steiner discusses his favourite looks and collection inspiration. All the products and looks shown in the video could be purchased instantly using shoppable video hot-spot tagging technology. Customers could click to explore details and then be redirected to the product display pages to buy. Ralph Lauren demonstrated how shoppable content can be a creative way of bringing the in-person retail experience online to push instant conversion.
As evident from these examples, interactive and shoppable videos are a brilliant format to bring authentic physical experiences online. Due to the base of this being a regular video, these can be created quickly and without a huge content creation cost. The interactive and shoppable layer can also be added onto the videos quickly, offering a scalable way to share this type of content online regularly.
Get in touch with us to learn more about interactive video and how this could work for your brand.