Great Work: Ted Baker’s Instagram Stories
Ted Baker created a striking set of vertical videos to promote its Autumn Winter collection on Instagram Stories
Retailer Ted Baker has been using Instagram to drive brand awareness and promote its products to a younger audience. For the launch of its Autumn Winter 2018 collection, the fashion brand created eight vertical videos for Instagram Stories featuring items from its mens and womenswear ranges.
Videos offer an intriguing glimpse of the collection and utilise a range of effects, from borders to split screens and kaleidoscopic visuals. The womenswear campaign features florals, sequins and exotic animals, while menswear videos showcase colourful products against a concrete backdrop.
“Every season, it’s our job to inject Ted’s brand personality into our campaigns and make them into something quirky, clever and memorable,” says Zoe Lines, Lead Campaign Creative at Ted Baker. “Ted’s campaigns for mens and womenswear need to sit together in the same world, yet have their own distinct identities. For womenswear, we wanted to juxtapose the wonderful floral prints and natural elements with man-made structures, concrete backdrops, and the iconic London skyline, creating unexpected combinations.” Menswear videos continue this theme, with patterned products displayed against stark grey interiors.
Both campaigns were filmed in and around London: “For womenswear, we chose to use London houses and rooftops as well as a studio setup. The key parts of the campaign were shot in a grand, rambling house on the Thames in Deptford, which we filled with floral blooms and installations as well as building a plunge pool and bringing in unusual animals,” explains Lines.
The menswear campaign was filmed at Collins Theatre, a 400-seat underground venue in Islington that has remained unfinished since building work was halted in 2008. “It presented plenty of challenges to shoot in but the angles and lighting gave a really dramatic effect,” says Lines. Additional content was filmed at a former jet-engine testing facility in Suffolk, a location with a suitably industrial look and feel.
The campaign led to an 8.2 point lift in ad recall, and Ted Baker says its Facebook and Instagram campaign for Autumn Winter 2018 drove 22% more website conversions than the previous season.
It’s the latest in a series of innovative Instagram projects from Ted Baker: last year, the brand experimented with episodic storytelling in an Instagram Stories campaign depicting fictional family The Bakers and, in 2016, it worked with Poke to create a tongue-in-cheek shoppable film.
Natasha Nutt, Senior Paid Social Executive at Ted Baker, says the retailer is using Instagram to reach a new audience and engage with younger consumers: “With our Instagram content, we take elements from the full campaign creative to create multiple shorter edits that we can seed out over a period of time,” she explains. “With Stories, we want to immerse new and existing audiences in the new collection through creating attention grabbing creative that [reflects] an overarching concept.”
Stories were followed by more product-focused Carousel and Collection ads, which were used to drive website visits among consumers who had interacted with the campaign or visited Ted Baker’s website in the past.
The campaign has proved more effective in driving new customers to Ted Baker’s site than traditional ‘direct to site’ ads, and Nutt says this will now form a key part of the brand’s Instagram strategy in the run-up to Christmas.
Great Work is part of Inspire, a partnership between Creative Review, Facebook and Instagram to showcase outstanding creative work across both platforms.
Facebook and Instagram’s Creative Hub was launched to help the creative communities understand mobile marketing. The online tool allows creatives to experiment with content formats – from Instagram video to Facebook Canvas – and produce mock-ups to share with clients and stakeholders. It also showcases successful campaigns created for mobile. Try out the mock up tool at facebook.com/ads/creativehub and see the inspiration gallery at facebook.com/ads/creativehub/gallery. For more info on Instagram’s community guidelines and how it protects users, see instagram-together.com