When digital media teams look for ways to better manage digital production for their interactive websites, they’re not just looking for surface-level tactics. They want nitty gritty details. What’s the best high impact rich media format to meet client (or team) KPIs and objectives? How long does it take to produce an interactive rich media experience? What worked and what didn’t?
One of our favorite parts of developing interactive rich media experiences is taking our readers behind the scenes. There are so many tactics and tips on digital production, but nothing illustrates them better than a client case study.
Interactive production: Building a successful interactive website for an international high-end retail brand
Create an interactive website to promote Lacoste fragrances
Coty Fashion
Lacoste
interactive game, fragrance finder quiz, holiday experience
5 (Spanish, English, German, French, Italian)
2 months
- 2 JavaScript developers
- 1 front end developer
- 1 art director
- 2 project managers
- 1 quality assurance
The concept for the interactive website was two-fold:
- Increase visibility of Lacoste fragrances by helping customers select a fragrance with a 5-question quiz. The quiz included questions about the wearer’s personality type and the words that best described them.
- Build brand engagement by playing with the Lacoste croc. Customers navigate the ski-wielding croc down a snowy slope, collecting as many fragrances as they can in one minute while avoiding time-sucking hazards like rocks and trees.
Why gamification and Playable Ads?
GIF of the game
The more time users spend interacting with brand assets, the better their brand recall.
That’s why we built gamification into the interactive Lactose website: to increase the chances that users will think of Lacoste when they look for perfumes.
Gamified experiences are a great way to engage with your target audience, especially during the holiday hustle and bustle. Interactive, gamified websites are fun to play with and fun to share. Well-executed gamified experiences are also a welcome distraction from the daily grind of deadlines, meetings, errands and responsibilities.
Notice we said well-executed.
Gamified experiences need to follow the same best practices as regular rich media experiences. They should be relevant, user-friendly and easy to navigate. If you’re targeting mobile users, the rules for gameplay should be easy to understand and mobile optimized.
PRO TIP: On the back end, interactive website creative for gamified experiences can result in massive file sizes, especially when the animation is involved. Avoid slow load times: make sure to compress and optimize your creative.
Pairing a quiz with a game
Interactive website: game quiz
BuzzSumo points out that one of the reasons quizzes are so compelling is because they tap into our natural desire to know more about ourselves and display the results to others.
Humans are hardwired to search for purpose. That’s what makes pairing a quiz with a game so effective. Quizzes are high impact – they give your audience a purpose, a result. In the case of the interactive Lacoste website experience, the quiz helped select a fragrance for a lucky someone, making the gift-giving process a little easier. The follow-up game added an element of fun and built engagement, too.
Key takeaways from producing an interactive website
It’s no surprise that interactive rich media experiences and high impact websites are more involved to produce than standard rich media experiences. There are more moving parts and the digital production process is longer.
These takeaways will help keep any digital media teams or rich media agency on track during their next digital production collaboration:
- Control the process: Clarity and communication are the foundation of successfully controlling the digital production process. Start every project with an in-depth briefing. Ideally, all your team members should be present. Then communicate early and often with tools like Slack, Asana, Basecamp or phone and e-mail.
- Be prepared to pivot: When working with a larger team or brand, plan for change. Especially if you’re building out a campaign in a high impact, interactive format. Whether it’s a complex approval process (creative, technical, legal) or an issue with a piece of creative, always have a Plan B, C, and D.
- Get creative with your solutions: Even the most experienced digital production agencies will encounter unexpected delays and setbacks while developing interactive rich media deliverables. Approvals fall through, a piece of creative takes longer to build than anticipated – the list goes on. Advise the key players and look at these roadblocks as opportunities. Can you go with a different interactive website format? Different messaging?
Let us know: are there any questions we missed? And what type of rich media campaign should we highlight next?
