Levi’s Interactive Ad Yields Feedback, Frustration
Levi Strauss & Co.’s first dip into the “experiential e-commerce” pool has been a learning experience for the jeans maker and its customers.
Levi’s worked with San Francisco-based Convergence Mediagroup to launch an interactive version of its popular Invisible People television advertising campaign on its Web site (https://www.levi.com) in late August. The streaming ad was embedded with a variety of e-commerce capabilities to allow viewers to buy Levi’s products and answer trivia questions with a chance of winning Levi’s merchandise.
However, in breaking new ground with its use of technology in advertising, the company has had to deal with considerable frustration.
“We’ve gotten good consumer feedback from the ad,” said Barth Ballard, the company’s digital marketing manager. “But it’s a very high-end experience for the Web. When you talk about the convergence of television and the Internet, this is it, and whenever you’re the first to do something, not everyone is ready for it.”
Levi’s would not release financial details of the campaign.
Marissa Gluck, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Communications, said, “Including e-commerce tools into an environment like that makes an ad much more interactive, and it could be really effective for certain categories like books, music and clothes.”
The primary technological obstacle for such tools, as is the case with many Internet-based broadcast ventures, is bandwidth--the carrying capacity of the phone line, cable or other transmission medium--which determines the speed of information that downloads into a personal computer.
That changes the experience for the viewer, said interactive advertising senior analyst Jim Nail of Forrester Research.
“People are on the Web to research products and get information, so these kinds of ads are ineffective unless you offer some kind of utility,” he said. “I don’t know why ad agencies are so obsessed with making the Web into TV. What they should be doing is recognizing that the Web and TV play two different roles. TV is great at building brand awareness, but the Web doesn’t do that.”
Nail noted the promotional efforts of Wisconsin-based Land’s End, which airs television ads that announce new customer-friendly Web site features and refer viewers to see for themselves.
Lee Eisenberg, executive vice president and creative director at Land’s End, said the goal of any marketing venture into uncharted technological territory is to better serve the customer, not to impress him or her with bells and whistles.
“We haven’t tested the patience of our customers and the limits of bandwidth in our advertising,” Eisenberg said. “We’ve been reluctant to do something that people are not technically capable of doing--we do not want to frustrate the shopping experience.”
Despite the technological limitations of mainstream consumers, Ballard said, Levi’s was pleased with the results of the company’s ad.
“The target consumer is the early adopter of technology, so it’s very much a teenage medium,” he said. “And the numbers on the ad so far are pretty good. We’ve had 40,000 unique visitors go through the entire experience, so they’ve really interacted with the brand.”
But Ballard isn’t sure where Levi’s goes next with its experiential advertising effort.
“Of course you’re going to have some growing pains involved here, and you have to try and figure out when the critical mass is ready for this,” he said.
