Moving Fashion Forward
  • The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show
  • Microsoft / Victoria’s Secret
  • 2009

Moving Fashion Forward

We partnered with Microsoft and Victoria’s Secret to introduce the 2009 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. To engage the audience prior to the live broadcast in December, we launched an online experience to get them as close to the fashion show as possible. Features include a runway model contest, videos and an image gallery. Cast your vote to determine who will appear onstage, or apply for your own chance to turn on the catwalk. The experience is built to be elastic, expanding and collapsing to display a variety of content. During and after the show, it will reveal additional footage of the Angels on the runway.

 

We leveraged Microsoft’s Silverlight technology throughout the engagement, finding novel ways to take advantage of the interactive platform’s uniformity and predictability. The continuous video play, while perhaps not as glamorous as the lingerie it displays, is notable in its own right (in part due to its utilization of Smooth Streaming technology).

 

So that you could keep up with the event while on the go, we also created the Victoria's Secret All Access iPhone application, which received hundreds of thousands of downloads within a few months of launch. Much like the site, it displayed videos, allowed you to weigh in on prospective runway models, and captured show highlights.

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Thoughts on Silverlight

I had the pleasure of diving headfirst into Silverlight in building the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment -- Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project's detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right?

So now that the project is launched, I'm feeling reflective. And I have to say: Silverlight is a worthy competitor to Flash. It is a lot of fun to build in. I recommend it. I think there are times when it'll be faster to build certain things in Silverlight than Flash and vice versa, and it is a matter of learning where the strengths and weaknesses are for each.

There were some things that frustrated me, but overall I found Visual Studio to be a great environment to learn to code in, C# was an extremely easy language to learn and most importantly of all the Silverlight player to be really flexible to the stress we put it under. Our team noted several times that we especially like Silverlight's animation capabilities -- we felt like we had far more "control" over what was happening on the screen than in Flash.