"By building and enhancing these interactive experiences using Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium software, we are helping our customer build strong, revenue-driving relationships with its primary consumers.”
Courtney Baker Director of Client Services WDDG
The sweet smell of brand engagement
In the same way Coty aspires to develop memorable fragrances, the company also strives to establish unforgettable brands. A global business unit of leading fragrance company Coty, Inc., Coty Prestige understands the power of the web and its ability to engage consumers with a particular brand.
To integrate interactive branding experiences into advertising campaigns for two Coty Prestige fragrances—Daisy Marc Jacobs and Covet Sarah Jessica Parker—Coty Prestige, in partnership with Coty’s Living Media Group, employed the expertise of WDDG. With expertise in digital strategy, design, and development, WDDG creates challenging, intelligent, and trendsetting experiences that maximize the online landscape. WDDG used Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium software to create entertaining web experiences for the fragrances focused on increasing brand awareness and driving revenue.
Benefits
- Pushed the limits of creative design and development
- Streamlined creative workflow with integrated product functionality
- Garnered 500,000 and 450,000 site visits for Daisy Marc Jacobs and Covet Sarah Jessica Parker respectively
Project Details
Ambitious advertising goals
As part of its Living Media Strategy, the Coty Living Media Group and the Coty brand teams worked with WDDG to bring its Daisy Marc Jacobs and Covet Sarah Jessica Parker brands to life. The team’s goal was to engage consumers through Living Media experiences that integrated with the web and extended the print and television campaigns.
Coty Prestige partnered with WDDG to develop its websites and other online experiences to engage its consumers on their terms and via their mediums of choice. For both Daisy and Covet, Coty Prestige utilized the web to build awareness, grow its database, and engage consumers with each of the brands through unique interactive experiences.
Exclusivity attracts
For the Daisy Marc Jacobs brand, WDDG developed an online “Secret Garden” and designed the website (www.daisymarcjacobs.com) to reach a specific group of young women who are devotees of Marc Jacobs and likely to be the trendsetters in their social circles. “The interactive experience creates a community of like-minded users and offers them a new way to connect with the Marc Jacobs brand,” explains Courtney Baker, director of client services for WDDG.
For the first six weeks, the site required an alphanumeric code to enter. Codes were sent via e-mail to editors, bloggers, and other trendsetters. After registering, each customer was encouraged to invite up to five additional people. After six weeks, the Daisy website opened to the public. “We wanted to create a sense of exclusivity at first,” explains Baker. “We knew that this would be an integral way to capture the interest of our consumer.”
Everyone loves a mystery
The Covet campaign took a slightly different approach. The team conceived the creation of an interactive, fictional mystery featuring Sarah Jessica Parker and her new fragrance, Covet, called The Case of the Coveted Bottle (www.caseofthecovetedbottle.com). The unique branding experience was built on the theme developed by the Coty Prestige SJP Global Development team in partnership with Alcone Marketing.
The launch for Covet involved print, broadcast, interactive advertising campaign elements, and in-store appearances by Sarah Jessica Parker at Macy’s, which included the hand-out of advertorials announcing the campaign. Several promotional elements included the URL and drove players to the website, including clues buried in the pages of Lucky magazine, banner ads on style.com and MySpace.com, a custom MySpace community (www.myspace.com/ covetsarahjessicaparker), and seeding on blogs.
Coty Prestige brought WDDG in to refine the concept, mold the narrative, and bring the experience to life. WDDG transformed the script developed by Alcone into a fully executable online initiative. “We leveraged our knowledge of customer interests and the target audience to create the look, feel, and functionality of the interactive mystery,” explains Baker. “Throughout the ten-week process, we created all online design, managed the weekly blog posts with the game challenges, seeded clues on MySpace blogs and Flickr pages, created graphics clues, and worked with the rules agency to finalize the contest. The beauty of an initiative that unfolded in this manner was the ability to mold it throughout its duration, based on the behavior of the community interacting with the experience.”
From idea to interactive experience
To build both websites, WDDG’s creative team relied on an integrated design and development workflow including Adobe Illustrator CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Dreamweaver CS3, and Flash CS3 Professional. First, the team developed concepts and designers used Illustrator CS3 to create the design and determine the look and feel for different sections and website elements. After completing the designs, WDDG showed the concepts to its client for approval.
With a green light from the client, developers took over and incorporated the designs into the website builds. Developers imported design elements and vector artwork created in Illustrator CS3 and images from Photoshop CS3 Extended into Flash CS3 Professional and then went to work transforming them into The Covet website challenged consumers to solve an online mystery that extended over ten weeks. The ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player enabled site visitors to enjoy a seamless, consistent, and fast experience as they worked to solve the case. interactive website components. WDDG also used Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 for all text editing within the websites. The integrated workflow offered creative flexibility while maximizing development productivity.
“In terms of design, we particularly love how easy it is to move artwork and images among Adobe Illustrator CS3, Photoshop CS3, and Flash Professional CS3,” says Mike Sheppard, creative director at WDDG. “It saves us a lot of time not having to recreate things like gradients and drop shadows in Flash Professional CS3.”
Technical development made simple
From a development perspective, one of the challenges of the Daisy site was to make the daisy field as immersive as possible. On both small and large screens, WDDG wanted the daisy field to look rich and expand elegantly, with a consistent frame rate and everything anchored correctly. The goal was to make it look panoramic, not stretched out.
“The BitmapData class in Adobe Flash Professional was fantastic at helping us create the complex daisy field images and transitions in a way that was not time consuming or processor intensive,” says Constantin Koumouzelis, director of technology at WDDG.
WDDG built the middle tier of the site in PHP, and edited the code in Dreamweaver CS3. Developers appreciated the syntax highlighting and similarity between commands in Dreamweaver CS3 and Flash Professional CS3, eliminating worries about learning and using different key commands.
The Case of the Coveted Bottle involved many images, making the efficiencies in Photoshop CS3 Extended especially useful. “Being able to adjust layers in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended and revert back later in the process has been a huge help,” says Koumouzelis. “Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS3 Extended are so easy to use that we never have trouble creating projects using these tools,” adds Sheppard.
Overall, the interactive experience wouldn’t have been possible without Flash Professional. Developers used all of the basic tools that the program has to offer, including timesaving drawing and programming tools, sophisticated video encoding capabilities, and the program’s common, intuitive user interface. The ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player enables site visitors to enjoy a seamless, consistent, and fast experience as they work to solve the case.
Proving the value of interactivity
The success of the Coty Prestige interactive branding experiences speak to the value of including interactive content in advertising campaign activities. In the first three months after launching Covet had approximately 500,000 total visits to the website, 1,500,000 page views, and consumers spent over four minutes on average on the site. Coty Prestige estimates that its consumers were engaged over 1,000,000 minutes during the campaign. The Daisy Marc Jacobs “Secret Garden,” which was created to grow more organically by word-of-mouth, had almost 450,000 visits to the website in its first few months and today has nearly 100,000 members, appropriately called “Daisies,” who have joined the global daisy field. 71% of these consumers have requested to learn more about Marc Jacobs fragrances in the future and over 36% of the members have forwarded viral e-mail messages to their friends.
WDDG continues to use Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium to design new community features for the Daisy Marc Jacobs site, including a friends list, internal e-mail messaging system, and a section that features gift sets and special Daisy items for sale in-store.
“By building and enhancing these interactive experiences using Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium software, we are helping our customer build strong, revenue-driving relationships with its primary consumers,” concludes Baker.
