British retailer Ted Baker has a new campaign that links bricks-and-mortar with online marketing by enabling customers to take selfies in front of digital displays and upload them to social media for a chance to win a prize.

The Merry Kissmas campaign is designed to drive store traffic and ultimately sales while also building social buzz about the retailer during the busy holiday shopping season. For the effort, shoppers at the retailer’s stores in New York City, London and Tokyo are being invited to take a picture of themselves under a large digital mistletoe installation and share it with friends.

“By leveraging selfies and social in store, retailers can create excitement and buzz, and grab attention at street level,” said Andy Meakin, director of production at Tangible Interaction.

“For participants – customers and passers by – it’s a collective experience,” he said. “Our Social Mosa visualizer encourages more people to participate in the social campaign which in turn helps generate online echo.

“It also connects people with each other and the brand who aren’t able to go to the actual retail location.”

Holiday selfies
The Ted Baker campaign was launched during the Dec. 7 weekend and will run until Dec. 22. It was built around Tangible Interaction’s Social Mosa, which displays crowd-sourced tweets and Instagrams via animation on digital screens.

Customers use their own smartphones to send tweets and Instagrams with their selfie using the hashtag #KissTed. Social Mosa continually searches for the content, grabs it and pulls it into an animation on a digital display on top of the store entrances to the Ted Baker stores located on Fifth Avenue in NYC, in London’s Westfield shopping center and Tokyo’s Omotesando shopping street.

Every tweet and Instagram is manually filtered using Tangible’s Monitor app on an iPad by Ted Baker store associates to insure that negative comments or images do not make it to the screen.

Social buzz
The digital installation incorporates campaign branding elements and windswept snowflakes, with consumers’ tweets and Instagrams appear in falling snowballs.

The result is a seasonal animation intended to grab attention at street level, generate positive buzz about Ted Baker online and drive viral awareness via social media.

The retailer’s Meet Me Under the Mistletoe call-to-action encourages passersby and in-store shoppers to take a photo under the mistletoe and share it on their personal Twitter and Instagram profiles using the #KissTed hash tag to be automatically be entered into a competition to win a holiday for two.

“While we’ve seen lots of retailers use social for online campaigns, visualizing it in the physical space is something new that we’re seeing them starting to embrace,” Mr. Meakin said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York