• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer @mahoney_sarah, February 19, 2024

Adore Me may delight customers with a steady stream of new bra and panty confections, but it has struggled to find new out-of-home strategies. Approaches the company felt would best build brand awareness have been tough to get by censors. So when Janina Santillan, director of brand and social media at Adore Me, heard about Ivee, the Chicago-based ad platform offering ads in ride shares, she pounced, testing a Black Friday Uber, Lyft and taxi blitz that boosted results by 22%. She tells D2C Insider how the company continues exploring this new channel.

D2C Insider: This story starts with you meeting Alex Giannikoulis, who founded Ivee, a software mobility company, at a MediaPost summit. What made you think that channel would be right for Adore Me?

Janina Santillan: We’re always looking for digital out-of-home products. As a lingerie company, it is challenging to do digital out-of-home ads because of censorship. There are a lot of things that we're not able to show. And this was something we hadn’t tried. I’m in New York City and a huge Uber user. So are our customers -- our biggest cities are New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. And women, for safety, take cars more than men, especially during evening hours.

D2C Insider: Ivee’s sales pitch offers an advertising product that it says is better than the current tech. And those taxi screens, admittedly, are annoying as hell. How are these different?

Santillan: These make me want to interact more, and even more than ads I see on my phone. These are on a 10-inch screen right in front of me, so the chances I’ll interact with this ad more than a billboard are much higher.

D2C Insider: What kinds of ads did you test?

Santillan: I’ve been at Adore Me for about a year and want to increase brand awareness. In the past, with many of our ads, if you took the logo away, they’d look like any other lingerie ad. These are playful, fun and sexy. And anyway you interact with them, the logo takes up a huge amount of the screen.

Also, Adore Me has been promoting inclusivity-diverse body types  since 2011. It’s not just a buzzword for us. For example, we’re so proud of our runway show last week at New York Fashion Week. These ads helped reach as many types of women as possible and then get tracking data back from Ivee.

D2C Insider: What kind of results did you get?

Santillan: We had an omnichannel push for Black Friday. And within digital out-of-home, we saw a 22% spike in social media acquisition compared to Black Friday of the prior year. We hadn’t expected that. This was a time when people were talking a lot about the weaker economy. So we were elated. We also saw a higher increase in website visits in the cities where we were using the Ivee platform.

D2C Insider: I spoke with Ivee's Alex, who explained that one out of three people engage with the tablets and that when they do, they tap 15 times and spend about five minutes interacting with content. And 100% of ride-share and taxi users that interacted with the Ivee screen saw an Adore Me offer. That’s about 2 million impressions. What did you learn about those people?

Santillan: We’re big on data, and this Ivee information, which is geo-tagged, is helpful. We think of ourselves as a tech company before we're a fashion company, and we’ve got a talented team of UX designers. Between our tech and the Ivee reporting, we can see where these spikes in awareness are the biggest.

D2C Insider: How will you use in-ride ads next?

Santillan: We used Ivee for our Valentine’s Day push. And we’re getting ready to launch bridal lingerie, and we’ll test different approaches on Ivee, too.

D2C Insider: Has the approach to testing new channels changed much since being acquired by Victoria’s Secret?

Santillan: We are trying different things, and we’ve got an internal initiative called “Make Adore Me Famous.” And as I said, more out-of-the-box thinking, like the digital out-of-home panels on the sides of ships, so that you can see on the beach. We’re playing with more ideas.