Rightster and IMG Fashion Reached the Largest Internet Audience to Date For Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2013 Collections

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Rightster and IMG Fashion unveiled that this season’s live stream of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2013 Collections at Lincoln Center reached the largest internet audience ever, demonstrating deep engagement with American designers’ runway shows around the world.

“We tracked viewing times upwards of twelve minutes, bringing huge consumer engagement opportunities for fashion brands. It’s an incredibly powerful platform and the designers and brands involved in the event were excited by the findings.”

The online audience viewing live streamed runway shows increased by more than 170% over the September 2012 event, marking the largest audience reached in the five seasons runway shows from Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week have been available via live stream. Mobile view rates were twice the industry average of 12%, with 24% of views occurring on mobile devices. Collectively, viewers watched more than nine years of runway show video during the eight days of the event and the average viewing time was around 12 minutes during live shows, demonstrating that viewers stayed to watch runway shows in their entirety.

Charlie Muirhead, Founder and CEO, Rightster, comments: “Interest in what American designers are showing on the runway is growing exponentially both domestically and abroad, and this is clearly evident when we look at our viewing statistics season after season. With this digital platform, Rightster and IMG Fashion are able to offer brands a solution to make their fashion association even more powerful against a highly desirable demographic.”

Muirhead continues: “We tracked viewing times upwards of twelve minutes, bringing huge consumer engagement opportunities for fashion brands. It’s an incredibly powerful platform and the designers and brands involved in the event were excited by the findings.”

“IMG Fashion is dedicated to providing solutions for designers to help them ultimately reach a greater audience of their consumers,” says Peter Levy, SVP and Managing Director, IMG Fashion Worldwide Events and Properties. “Rightster gives media an easily accessible tool that provides their followers convenient access to more live designer runway shows and on demand content than ever before. The number of fashion-conscious consumers that are seeing the Collections on the runway at the same time as the buyers and journalists in the front row is an incredible benefit to the designers showing at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.”

Rightster’s technology allows online fashion and style-relevant media, blogs and websites to easily embed a video player on their site with a simple code. For the first time, viewer data was collected from more than 200 websites that hosted the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week live stream, unlocking key learnings about the US audience.

The campaign uncovered that the primarily female online viewing audience of the designer runway shows is younger than the average US internet user, with the female 18-24 year old demographic over-indexed by over 123% and those in the 25-34 year old demographic by an astounding 150%. More than 50% of all female viewers were under the age of 34. The campaign also uncovered a broad ethnic diversity of the viewing audience, African-American, Asian and Hispanic viewers over-indexed by 49%, 53% and 50% respectively. The typical live stream viewer is college educated with no children at home.

This is the second season that Rightster has been the live stream partner of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week to increase the reach of designer’s runway shows through a network of relevant blogs, websites and platforms.

ENDS

For a briefing with Charlie Muirhead or for further information, please reach out to Dan Gamble, Hotwire PR. [phone]

About Rightster:

Rightster is a leading cloud-based video distribution specialist that enables rights holders and producers, such as ITN, BFC (British Fashion Council) and IMG Fashion to gain full control and visibility over their video distribution, maximizing their audience reach and revenues across all platforms and publishers from newspapers such as Mail Online to premium blog sites. Rightster’s turnkey services, such as audience development, remove the in-house complexity of managing technology and integration with publishers and platforms. This gives rights holders and producers the quickest and easiest route to market, as well as the flexibility to experiment and innovate with new digital services and revenue models for both live streaming and video on demand.

About IMG Fashion:

IMG Fashion is dedicated to facilitating a gateway to the fashion world - from creation to consumer. We offer solutions that seamlessly connect and associate fashion's key constituents and corporate brands using IMG's global resources, influence and expertise. Within the fashion industry, IMG represents the world's top models, leading designers and the most influential photographers, art directors and stylists. The division produces the leading fashion events around the globe and represents many of the industry's top organizations and federations.