• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 20, 2016

Ted Baker's espionage campaign using shoppable video ads launched earlier this month, making waves across the fashion world but little noise in advertising. It integrates all the bells and whistles, including Google voice and retail store window displays that send secret messages to the consumer's phone using location signals.

The ads are powered by Wirewax, which allows brands to add clickable hotspots or tags to any moving person or object in the video. The ad is available on Tedbaker.com, Selfridges.com and Nordstom.com, along with the brand's YouTube channel.

Ted Baker's ad -- a takeoff of "Mission Impossible" -- seems more suitable to view on a mobile device, but it also run on desktop. As the video runs, consumers can touch or click on the plus [+] symbol displaying on the screen over the item to add the shirt, the dress, the purse or the pants into the shopping cart. At first it seems a little confusing as to the way consumers must add the items. Since I viewed the ad on a laptop my initial reaction was to click on the plus symbol on the keyboard.

The items are put into a "vault" and the shopper must visit that vault when the movie concludes to add the items into the shopping cart before making the purchase. Innovative idea, but a few too many steps, in my opinion, during checkout.

The shoppable video ad — Mission Impeccable, produced by Guy Richie — is one in several that consumers can expect to see from London-based Ted Baker.

But does it make more sense to have a shoppable video ad run in an app or on the mobile Web? eMarketer released numbers Tuesday that show people spend 85.7% of their time on smartphones in apps rather than on the Web.

American adults will spend 1 hour and 54 minutes per day using apps on their smartphones -- up seven minutes compared with 2015, according to eMarketer. The analyst firm reports that consumers will only surf the mobile Web on their phones for 19 minutes per day, down two minutes compared with last year.

David Moth, social media manager at Econsultancy, points to a Twitter tweet that led him down the "office stairwell" to the local Ted Baker store in London, where he found the store windows dressed to suit the campaign, complete with a note, "crafted suing Google" with the ability to "tap the mic" to interact with the campaign and receive a discount code.

Moth wrote that the secret Web site was presented as a paid-search result and the landing page displayed as an animated Gif after the password was accepted. He also mentions seeing people speaking the code into their mobile phones through Google voice.