Only six seats remaining

Secure your place at the Digiday Media Buying Summit in Nashville, March 2-4

REGISTER

Sephora is betting big on augmented reality for beauty

Bridget Dolan and her team at Sephora’s Innovation Lab, based in San Francisco, were a year into developing a new virtual reality tool for the retailer’s mobile app when the technology used to power the experience saw a breakthrough.

“When it comes to augmented and virtual reality, it can only be successful if it’s truly useful,” said Dolan, Sephora’s head of innovation. “We weren’t interested in just buzzy. A lot of things like technical accuracy and timing had to come together, and there was a time last year when, during testing, we hit a tipping point.”

Sephora’s team and its technology provider, augmented reality platform ModiFace, had pushed facial recognition technology to a new point of sophistication. After months of development, the technology can break down one virtual makeup application into a step-by-step layering process, while maintaining critical accuracy and reaching mass scale.

More in Marketing

In Graphic Detail: The state of the marketing agency sector

Revenue figures from Omnicom, Publicis and Havas, and new employment stats, offer a snapshot on a quickly evolving industry.

Illustration of a performer balancing money weights on a tightrope, symbolizing how brand safety tools help marketers maintain performance and control.

Future of Marketing Briefing: The mental gymnastics of principal media

Welcome to the psychological CrossFit class of modern marketing. Here’s how marketers are learning to move through it.