Orchestrating your campaigns
A collection comes out in February and has to be told. In March there is the trade fair, and the stand needs something else entirely: a handful of frames, the programme of the day, a code to scan on the spot. In June the warehouse has to be cleared, and that speaks to a different audience again. In the autumn Germany wants the campaign in German with an assortment of its own. And all the while the brand needs a place that is simply always there, all year round, where the whole collection can be looked at and tried on.
Those are five different things. They have different audiences, they live on different supports — the shop window, the badge, the newsletter, the printed advert, the packaging — and each one needs to show different frames.
Usually each becomes a thing of its own: a new address, a new brief, materials made again from scratch, and by the end of the year five islands that do not talk to each other. The numbers do not add up, the experience does not look like itself, and the codes printed for February's campaign lead nowhere by March.
One Gateway, many doors
The Gateway turns the order around. It is not the campaign that brings a place to land with it: the place is already there, and there is only one of it, and the campaigns take their turn inside.
The ways in, on the other hand, are as many as you want. A link for the newsletter, a QR code for the shop window, another for the printed advert, one for the trade-fair badge, one on the case. Each can lead to a different catalogue, or to the same catalogue told a different way, or straight into the try-on on a single frame. They are all doors into the same house — and behind them there are as many catalogues as you need: one per door, or one catalogue shared by several doors, as it suits the campaign.
And each one, once printed, stays good. The code on this year's case will still work two collections from now: what changes is what it finds behind it, not the address. This is where the Gateway parts company with the campaign landing page, where every new campaign is a new address to put back into circulation.
That the doors are many and the house is one is the whole point: the numbers add up. You know how many people came in from the window and how many from the newsletter, and together you know how many people met the brand this year — which five separate landing pages would never tell you.
This is the word we use for it: orchestration. You are not building five things, you are arranging five settings of pieces you already have — your frames in 3D, your identity, your content — and calling them up when they are needed.
Every campaign comes out of four decisions, and they are yours:
| The decision | The question |
|---|---|
| The audience | Who is this campaign talking to? |
| The doors | Where do people come in — window, print, badge, social, packaging, email, shop sign — and how many separate doors do you want, so you know where they arrived from? |
| The catalogues | Which frames does each door lead to? There are as many catalogues as you need — one per door, or one shared by several. |
| The experience | What do you switch on for them: the story, the try-on, extra content, the store map? |
What does not change from one campaign to the next is the identity. Colours, logo and typefaces belong to the Gateway, and stay the same whichever door you come in by: that is what makes five different campaigns look like one brand.
What it changes, in practice
You never start from scratch again. The second campaign starts from what is already there. So does the third. The real work — modelling the frames, settling the look, writing the brand's story — you do once.
You can change a campaign while it is in the air. The frames, the wording, which sections are switched on: all of it can be updated on a campaign that is already published, without touching anything printed or already in circulation. If your hero frame is not the one you thought it was, you find out from the analytics and move it to the front on Monday.
You can run two versions side by side. Two doors can lead to two versions of the same campaign — a different order in the guided selection, a different assortment up front, a different story — and after a fortnight you know which of the two brought more people through to the try-on. It is not a survey: it is the same measurement, on the same journey, on real numbers.
Frames modelled in 3D are reused for good. A model optimised once serves the product page, the try-on, every future campaign and every other place ARShades works — your website, the store, the mirror. You pay for the 3D once and amortise it across every campaign to come, not only the one you commissioned it for.
You go live quickly. A new campaign is not a project, it is a configuration. When the frames are already modelled, going from let's do it to a code ready to print takes days rather than months — and that changes which opportunities you can afford to take.
Four ways to use it
Several campaigns in parallel
What surprises people who start is not running two campaigns at once: it is how little the third one costs. Once the way in is standing and the frames are modelled, opening one more campaign is a marketing decision rather than a budget to defend. It changes the kind of occasion worth chasing — the small collaboration, the ten-piece capsule, the Christmas gifting push — the ones a dedicated landing page could never quite justify.
And the physical shop window, for the first time, has numbers against it: how many people scanned the code, how many went through to the try-on, which frame they lingered on.
Markets, channels and audiences
The same collection is not told the same way everywhere. The language changes, the assortment changes — not every model sells in every country — and sometimes the reader changes too: the consumer is not the optician who resells.
The point is that the story changes without duplicating the product. The frames stay the same, with the same data and the same measurements, kept in one place. What changes is which subset is shown, in which language, and inside which story.
For the retail channel there is one thing more: the store map. It is the only case where the journey has to end off the screen, and the try-on is there to help decide before walking into the shop, not instead of walking in.
Events and activations
At an event the audience already has the phone in hand and is already interested: they do not need to be persuaded to come, they have come. It is the best condition a digital campaign can have, and it lasts a few hours.
Two things the event does that the stand alone cannot. The stand shows fifteen frames; the Gateway lets people try on as many as you like — the depth the table does not have. And the programme of the day changes right up to the last minute: you update it that morning, while the QR code on the badges was printed three weeks earlier.
The brand's permanent window
This is the campaign that does not end: the whole collection, the brand's story, the try-on. It sits there all year, and your website, your email signature, your packaging and your social profiles all point at it.
It is worth seeing it for what it is — the one digital address you never have to remake. Seasonal campaigns you open and close; this one stays, and every code you have ever pointed at it keeps working while the collection renews itself behind.
Where to start
Almost nobody starts with four campaigns. You start with one — usually the permanent window, because it stands up on its own — and the others are added when the occasion turns up, without touching anything already out there.
When you have a new campaign in mind, four lines are enough: who it talks to, where you are putting the codes, which frames it should show, and what you want the visitor to be able to do. We take care of the rest.