Inside Bustle's First Virtual Holiday Shopping Experience

The holiday season normally marks a time for brands to go all out with shopping pop-ups to provide gift ideas and drive awareness among consumers. But the pandemic has forced brand marketers to strategize how to safely pivot these experiences without completely losing the magic of shopping for gifts in person. Bustle Digital Group is trying its hand at a virtual retail experience with a free, 21-day activation for consumers. Shop Holiday: 21 Days of Gifting aims to gamify online shopping through an interactive digital rendering of a snowy, open-air holiday market. Throughout the experience, which kicked off Nov. 27 and runs through Dec. 18, readers can buy products and snag giveaways from seven brand partners: Samsung, Kohl's, Gap, Intimissimi, Carolina Herrera, Unilever’s Talenti and Amazon Prime Video. The experience includes a virtual photo booth and a daily giveaway station hosted by Elite Daily. Bustle Digital Group president and chief revenue officer Jason Wagenheim said the publisher produces more than 30 advertiser- and editorially-driven events annually among its nine media brands. December is reserved for women’s lifestyle platform Zoe Report’s Let It Zoe event, a winter-themed gathering in Los Angeles that invites some 300 influencers to preview holiday essentials from brands. When the media company deemed a physical holiday experience unsafe earlier this year, Wagenheim said his internal marketing team spent the last three months ideating and executing the retail event in partnership with Mark Stephen Experiential Agency. “Experiential drives a lot of sponsorship revenue, great user engagement and is a chance for us to connect one-on-one with readers at a different level,” Wagenheim said. “With people most likely stuck at home for the holidays this year, we wanted to get as close as possible to replicating the holiday shopping vibe and energy in a virtual world. We wanted to [highlight] our best brands in a shopping experience that brings an old-fashioned holiday market to [consumers’] homes.” Accessible on desktop and mobile, the choose-your-own-adventure experience invites guests to navigate kiosks surrounding a fire pit. Wagenheim described the event aesthetic as “Minecraft slammed into a Bryant Park-inspired holiday shopping experience.” A main stage offers video tutorials and gift guides led by editors. Each advertiser kiosk includes snowflake and gift icons that link to interactive gift recommendations or redirect to the brand’s website. Certain kiosks also provide the option to purchase directly on the microsite. For example, Gap and Kohl’s offer personality-based quizzes to help shoppers determine which items they should buy for friends or family. Meanwhile, Unilever’s self-care shop links to helpful editorial content such as “14 Self-Care Products Under $10 You Need To Stock Up On This Winter.” Along with the partner kiosks, the experience also includes a daily giveaway station hosted by Elite Daily; a virtual DJ booth and photo booth; and a main stage, which offers instructional videos led by Bustle Digital Group editors, including a guide to gifting gaming consoles. “The driver behind the strategy here was the way we could build a community around this experience,” Wagenheim said, “with sharing functionalities such as the photo booth, along with giveaways and access to great products and content from advertisers and editors.” Wagenheim noted the upside to taking the holiday shopping event virtual this year is that it allows Bustle Digital Group to easily and more immediately track metrics and measure its success. As the company estimates some 10,000 people will attend the experience, Wagenheim said his internal team will measure how many people interact with the individual boutiques, how much time they spend at each kiosk and how many clicks and conversions each kiosk draws. If the experience is as successful as Bustle Digital Group hopes over the next three weeks, Wagenheim said the company will potentially invest in more iterations of the virtual shopping activation for occasions such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. He added that the experience represents a new model for how publishers can engage readers while in-person experiential marketing remains unsafe. “How can we create new, interactive ways to draw our readers in and get them participating, not just with us, but with the brands we care about?” Wagenheim said. “This represents a new way forward that, even coming out of the pandemic, we’ll consider to be part of our arsenal.”

Experiential Marketing

Bustle’s Virtual Shopping Event Might Fill the Holiday Pop-Up Void This Season

The 21-day experience aims to gamify purchasing products from 7 advertisers

Ian Zelaya

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Ian Zelaya