American Eagle Outfitters' Promotion Centered On Mobile Video

By Sam Lewis

Teen retailer’s campaign asks shoppers to strike a pose

Pittsburgh-based American Eagle Outfitters (AE) wasted little time putting its new San Francisco technology center to work. The retailer has launched a campaign called “Rock Your Walk,” which uses mobile video as the primary means for customers to become part of its promotion.

It comes as no surprise that AE, which focuses on the teen demographic, would invest so much into the mobile aspect of retail. “We decided to highlight mobile within our “Rock Your Walk” campaign because our core demographic is interacting with us on their mobile devices,” said Jeremy Xavier, senior director of mobile at AE, Pittsburgh.

Here is the gist of AE’s new promotion: the retailer is running advertisements within mobile editions of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, to promote “Rock Your Walk.” The ads take consumers to the campaign’s site. From there, consumers learn about the promotion, which involves shooting a short mobile video. AE instructs users to walk into the frame of the video on the left, while wearing a pair of the retailer’s brand jeans, and to strike a pose. Then, the user should exit the frame on the right, after no more than 15 seconds of video. The video is then uploaded through the campaign’s site, or through Vine or Instagram apps with the hashtag #rockyourwalk. American Eagle Outfitters’ incentive for users is $10 off of a $40 purchase after entering. The retailer hopes to string together many of the short videos featuring its jeans to create one larger fashion show video.

In addition to this new promotion, the retailer has updated its iPhone app. The biggest addition to the app allows AE customers to store their AERewards to Apple’s Passbook. This feature creates a virtual loyalty card stored in Passbook, which is triggered when a consumer is near and AE location and is able to be scanned at POS.

AE is well aware of the importance of mobile in retail. The company optimizes its e-mails for mobile as 70 percent of them are opened with mobile devices. Ultimately, AE hopes to have customer interactions with the brand be the driving force of their business. “As we move toward getting our customers to interact with and shape our brand, mobile is going to be a key enabler of that,” Xavier said.