Fashioning the future: the impact of Immersive Rich Media in the fashion industry

Fashion thrives on innovation, novelty, and constant evolution.
It’s an arena where standing out is paramount and resting on laurels doesn’t cut it.

As digital technology shapes a brave new era, fashion brands are racing to find creative ways to communicate, connect, and captivate their audience in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace.

Traditional digital advertising is struggling to engage today’s consumers. Outdated formats fail to engage, and irrelevant ads annoy them. This can lead to up to 40% of advertising budgets being wasted each year. In addition, impressions and click-through rates only tell part of the story, leaving marketers wondering if their investments are delivering results.

So how can brands stand out and reach consumers effectively when digital advertising isn’t working? How can they invest with confidence when budgets are wasted and data is incomplete?

Immersive Rich Media is emerging as a solution that redefines the way brands engage with consumers, reimagining the very essence of display advertising. In the process, it enables brands to gather insightful data on ad performance and engagement to guide future marketing efforts.

In a world where customers can virtually try on clothes and accessories, Immersive Rich Media enables them to do so earlier, in the discovery phase of their journey – directly in a ad banner.

Does it sound futuristic?
This is not a figment of some distant future; it’s here, it’s happening, and it’s called Immersive Rich Media.

The intersection of the fashion industry with Immersive Rich Media is enabling brands to break the barriers of tried-and-tested advertising and transform passive observers into active participants.

Three of the most prominent Immersive Rich Media formats – 3D Ads, Virtual Try-on Ads, and AR Viewer Ads – are profoundly reshaping the fashion industry landscape, offering it countless premium ad solutions.

3D Viewer Ads represent a breakthrough in digital advertising.
As the name implies, these ad formats use three-dimensional technology to provide a more holistic view of products. Instead of static images, 3D ads bring apparel and accessories closer to the consumer, allowing for deeper product exploration.

They can rotate, zoom, and explore every inch of a product, helping them appreciate the design, texture, and even their most intricate details. This allows customers to evaluate products at the beginning of their journey, significantly enhancing the customer experience.

With Virtual Try-On Ads, the fashion industry can now shorten the time between product discovery and the actual fitting room experience – while making it an enjoyable process. This form of Immersive Rich Media allows consumers to “try on” clothing, footwear, or accessories in the banner, using their device’s camera.

These experiences are often implemented by e-commerce brands to enhance the online shopping journey for their customers, enabling more informate purchase decisions and ultimately reducing returns.

When applied to digital advertising, Virtual Try-On provides a way to showcase the latest styles and collections to consumers, enabling them to virtually ‘try on’ items before visiting the retailer’s website.
By reinventing the ad experience through interactivity, fashion brands can capture attention and drive brand awareness, putting the consumer at the hearth of the stage.

While Virtual Try-On ads excel at allowing consumers to see how a fashion item will look on them, AR Viewer ads expand the possibilities of product exploration. AR Viewer is an Augmented Reality experience often used to showcase product categories such as furniture or home decor, but it can also show off products in a way that Virtual Try-On can’t.

For example, while VTO can show how a bag might look being carried, an AR Viewer ad could allow the consumer to view the inside lining and stitching through an interactive 3D model. This caters to more demanding customers’ needs, who want to inspect the product in a deeper way before purchasing.

This represents a step further in the ability to give product previews to customers, sparking awareness (and desire) long before they even know the product exists. It offers an engaging, interactive, and personal experience that not only increases the likelihood of a purchase but also strengthens the awareness of the brand and their products.

In a nutshell, Immersive Rich Media is opening up new advertising dimensions in the fashion industry. 3D Ads, Virtual Try-on Ads, and AR Viewer Ads are not just fads – they will soon become the state-of-the-art for the fashion display advertising. These technologies are set to push the fashion industry forward into a future where the boundary between the digital and physical world blurs more and more every day.

Immersive Rich Media invites users into a realm of interactivity.
How? Rather than just relying on text or static images, these next-generation ads utilize HTML5, Javascript and Iframes to create complex layers of content in a single ad placement.

The first thing that’s important to note is that these immersive formats provide an engaging user experience when compared to traditional ones. They draw the user’s attention, break the boring stream of static content and entice them to interact with the ad. This interactivity often translates to higher conversion rates, click-throughs, and viewing rates. That sounds like a pretty good deal for advertisers.

I can almost hear you asking a resounding ‘why’.
The answer is pretty simple: we are growing more and more annoyed and distrusted at ads.
Study shows that every day we are targeted with approximately 4,000 to 10,000 ads. The majority of them aren’t even relevant to us, and are soon to be forgotten. Forgotten, for advertisers, means dollars wasted: in creatives that don’t resound with the target, with out-of-context ad placement or just little to no understanding of the audience who will see that ad.

This should explain why IRM are highly valued by advertisers: they position themselves as premium ad formats, deliver more user’s positive attention when compared to traditional ads and offer levels of engagement never seen before.

When combined with a relevant context (often ensured by programmatic ad placements) they become a powerful tool in an advertiser’s kit, enabling brands to leave a lasting impression on consumers.

This drives to another impactful reason for IRM being so central in fashion advertising.
These innovative formats offer new data points, enabling advertisers to gather more valuable insights from campaigns.

For example, Virtual Try-On experiences can help identify which product elements and styles work best with certain skin types or body proportions. Heatmaps can reveal where the consumer’s eye is focused when visualizing fashion items, giving brands an idea of what works and enabling continuous improvement.
Data such as facial shape, hair color and skin tone can inform future product development and enable hyper-personalized recommendations.

And the best part? All the information collected is zero-party data, so users give the brand permission to use it.

With these tailored insights, brands can see which products perform best, which sizes and colors are most popular, and optimize advertising strategies and product selection accordingly.
Immersive Rich Media provides unprecedented data on fashion consumer behaviour and preferences through attention metrics and interaction tracking. For forward-thinking brands, this intelligence is invaluable in connecting with audiences and tailoring both ad campaigns and products to their tastes.

Lastly, it’s important to note that in competitive industries (like fashion or the automotive ones) being remarked as an innovator and outpace the competition in the adoption of new technologies, can make a big difference.

Therefore it is better not to underestimate these new formats, dismissing it as a passing fad. Immersive Rich Media are here to stay: they have the potential to reshape entirely the advertising landscape, building a better scenario for users and advertisers.

Immersive Rich Media represents a seismic shift in the digital landscape.
Not only does it dramatically improve the richness and interactivity of advertising, but it also delivers more relevant and interesting content to the end user, who is plagued by the sameness that floods the advertising landscape.

By providing customers with an unprecedented level of interaction and personalization, Immersive Rich Media bridges the gap between what consumers expect and what businesses can offer, shaping a more satisfying shopping journey that can lead to increased conversion rates and enhanced brand loyalty.

The wealth of data provided by these experiences also enables more informed product development and marketing. For example, heat maps reveal which visual elements attract consumer attention, guiding design and merchandising efforts. Interaction tracking can provide insights into which campaigns and products resonate with consumers, and which parts they explore more often. Hyper-relevant and data-enriched recommendations can then be offered to consumers based on this data.

With privacy changes eliminating third-party cookies, Immersive Rich Media offers brands a new way to efficiently launch and scale personalised ads that differentiate them from the competition. The immersive assets created, typically costly spot creatives, can be reused across channels, such as e-commerce product pages, thanks to the Aryel Marketing suite.

The immersive advertising era is here, offering an opportunity to turn advertising into a rich, engaging, and ultimately rewarding experience for consumers.

Ready to immerse your brand into the future? Want to experience first-hand the power of 3D, Virtual Try-On and AR Viewer Ads? Schedule a demo with our sales team to discover the transformative potential of Immersive Rich Media for your business.