Topshop is taking London Fashion week around the Country when they take over large digital advertising billboards in Manchester, Leeds, London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow to highlight the latest fashions straight from the catwalk. Working with twitter they will identify the trending topics from the Capitals Fashionistas before updating the Topshop cloud with hashtag identifiers such as #colourblocking and #floral. The fashion conscience may then tweet @topshop with the hashtag of their choice to receive a virtual wardrobe straight to their mobile.

The visual impact of digital billboards has much greater potential than the traditional billboard. Static images are a thing of the past, images can change in seconds, colours change according to the time of day, products not generating tweets can be dropped or how about weather dependent content – started raining, no problem lets advertise rain coats! Ocean Outdoors who provided the screens for the Topshop campaign clearly believe they are on to a winner as they http://www.oceanoutdoor.com/ expand across the Country.

Of course Topshop is primarily motivated in this venture by the sales it generates, respondents who receive individualised tweets are able to make immediate purchases but is there more to be gained? With its potential for personalised communication with individuals who have chosen to follow an organisation’s Twitter feed, Twitter clearly increases the scope for interactive communication by organisations with their customers (Burton and Soboleva, 2011).

For the marketing team at Topshop could there be a better way of assessing the effectiveness of their advertising spend, customer reaction is immediate and the resulting sales are quantifiable which is not something that may be said about an advertising campaign in print media.

So is the future of fashion advertising now in digital? For those shoppers in the Cities with large digital billboards the opportunity to feel a part of a major fashion event through social commerce is an attractive one but the rest of the Country may have to wait a little longer. The traditional advertising platforms will argue that tie-ins with Fashion Week allow relatively short-term windows of opportunity to push sales, build customer relationships and show the latest styles. However studies show that increased customer interactivity can lead to high source credibility (Fogg, 2003) and the public is keen to participate. So it would appear that digital billboards are here to stay and those retailers looking to innovate and open communications direct with their customers will surely look for impactful campaigns that grab the interest of the public in a highly visual medium.

REFERENCES

• Burton,S., Soboleva, A. (2011) Interactive or reactive? Marketing with Twitter. The Journal of Consumer Marketing. Vol 28. Iss 7 PP. 491-499
• Mortimer, N. (2015) Topshop and Hunter to leverage digital OOH ads during London Fashion Week. The Drum. (Online) Acessed: 18^th March 2015 Available at: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/02/18/topshop-and-hunter-leverage-digital-ooh-ads-during-london-fashion-week
• Fogg, B.J. (2003) Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.