Ted Baker — Take on Ted

In November 2010, Ted Baker launched its US eCommerce offering and wanted to drive traffic to it through a piece of activity with appeal beyond the fashion world. Along the way it wanted to build relationships with key fashion pillars in the US fashion world – bloggers, journalists and affiliates.

In response, Guided created the world’s first remote-controlled digitally enabled pro-styling studio: a photography studio in Ted’s London HQ was controlled remotely by US-based fashion bloggers… using a live video stream, Twitter and nothing more. 7 influential bloggers each had 15 minutes to style and shoot two key looks.

In a nutshell the bloggers became the puppet masters of a live shoot controlling everything from the models, makeup, hair and clothing choice – but only via tweets @ted_baker – as the readers of each blog tuned in (via Livestream) to watch their favoutite bloggers take the reigns.

After the bloggers had had their turn, the studio was opened up to the public to control it from a far.

Giving bloggers creative control and empowering them to create content was a big part of the strategy… the blogger’s official shots were retouched and watermarked over the weekend and sent to them on Monday for inclusion on their sites. By Wednesday they also received a 1 min film – an edit of their time in the studio – which was embedded on their blogs. A week later their looks were merchandised across Ted’s 13 US stores… all creating more reasons to keep writing about Ted.

Here’s the case study film…

Results:

- 20k live viewers over 5hrs
- Twitter – 5000 related tweets with estimated reach of 2.8 million
- Fashion blogs – over 50 posts with estimated reach of 2.5 million people
- Fashion press – Covered by the likes of Drapers
- Outside fashion – covered by likes of Mashable, PSFK, Notcot, Contagious and Metro (UK)
- Increase to Ted’s Facebook fans / Twitter followers
- Relationships established with top fashion bloggers
- Full suite of content of each participating blogger’s site
- Impressive goodwill…
- ROI 5x investment