NEW YORK, United States — Fashion brands are finally getting serious about digital media. But so far, their strategies have mostly focused on marketing and communications initiatives like interactive advertising campaigns, fashion films and live-streamed runway shows. Integrating digital technology into the core product offering remains a largely unexploited area of opportunity. Here, fashion companies can learn a lot from one of the world’s most digitally innovative brands: global sportswear giant Nike.
Last month, to coincide with the start of the FIFA World Cup, Nike launched a three-minute film called “Write the Future”, featuring football superstars like Wayne Rooney and Didier Drogba. According to web video analytics company Visible Measures “Write the Future” clocked a record 7.8 million online views in its debut week, underscoring the power of creating compelling digital content that consumers will voluntarily seek out and share with others.
Luxury fashion brands like Chanel have followed a similar strategy, creating their own digital content to earn attention and free media, and learning to think more like publishers in the process. But for all the recent buzz around “Write the Future,” Nike’s long-term digital strategy has focused less on marketing and communications initiatives and more on developing digital product and service platforms.
Who will be part of The Online Fashion 100 in 2010?
LONDON, United Kingdom — Last year, the online fashion community in London was abuzz when Leon Bailey Green and London’s Independent newspaper co-published the ‘Online Fashion 100,’ a list of the most “Inspirational, Interesting, and Influential people in the Online Fashion Industry.”
Today, BoF has the exclusive scoop on a few of the names that will appear on this year’s list, due to be published on Monday alongside expert commentary from Hilary Alexander of The Daily Telegraph and Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com fame.
So without further ado, here’s a sneak peek at the Online Fashion 100 for 2010.
NEW YORK, United States — Now that most luxury brands have come to accept that the internet is a powerful tool for commerce and that social media provides an opportunity for a new kind of brand engagement, along comes another technological wave that will feed the ongoing digital revolution in fashion — and take it mobile.
Indeed, according to Internet analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, “more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.” What does this mean for luxury and fashion brands? And, as consumers continue to migrate to smart mobile devices, how does this change the dynamics for operating fashion commerce and communication in the mobile space, and the wider social web?
To provide the answers, I turned to Dinesh Moorjani, Senior Vice President of Mobile at IAC — the company that owns The Daily Beast, Evite, Urbanspoon and more than 40 other internet properties — and a speaker at the upcoming Luxury Lab Mobile Clinic to be held on 23 June in New York City.
VICENZA, Italy — Whereas Italy may have initially been slow on its uptake of Fashion 2.0, momentum appears to be building there to embrace digital media in all its forms, but especially fashion film. Indeed, two high profile events focused on moving image in fashion will take place in the month of May alone, bringing a much needed digital awareness to the country’s conservative fashion mainstream.
Tomorrow, in Vicenza, is the launch of OPPURE II, La moda in movimento verso i nuovi media, an exhibition curated by Federico Sarica, director of the Italian edition of VICE magazine and professor of fashion and new media at the European Institute of Design ModaLab in Milan. OPPURE II will showcase moving image in fashion and discuss its impact on the future of the industry. And, later this month, Diane Pernet will bring ASVOFF, her pioneering peripatetic fashion film festival, to Milan in collaboration with Vogue Italia.
Earlier this year, we featured the stunning short film for Fred Butler by Elisha Smith-Leverock which debuts at Pernet’s event in Milan, and today we bring you one of the featured films for OPPURE by Luca Merli. More OPPURE films can be viewed on the BoF YouTube page.
The Business of Fashion is an official media partner for OPPURE II which runs from 14 May 2010 – 27 June 2010 at Spazio Monotonorun by Cristiano Seganfreddoin Vicenza, Italy
NEWYORK, United States — Catching a rare bit of television last week in between updates on the Icelandic volcano and the first ever televised British Election debate, I stumbled upon an episode of Electric Dreams on the BBC, which takes an average British family from 2010 right back to the 1970’s, stripping away every bit of modern technology in their home. Then, slowly, episode by episode, decade by decade, the family gets all of its technology back, like they are experiencing it for the first time. The key difference now, of course, is that they have the hindsight of knowing what’s to come in the years ahead.
In the 1970’s the family gets central heating, and the 1980’s sees the arrival of the first home computer, but it wasn’t until the 1990’s rolled around that one sees the huge impact of consumer technology on their daily lives. From fax machines, brick-sized mobile phones and pagers, the family rapidly integrates the gadgets into their lives, and then disposes of them just as quickly as soon as the next great thing comes along.
Growing up during this technological and communication revolution has been the so-called Generation Y, born between 1977-1994. They are notoriously difficult to reach using traditional media channels, having rapidly adopted new media and digital technologies. They rely on the Internet for absolutely everything. Indeed, no matter what new technologies were given to the Electric Dreams family, the younger generation was ultimately dissatisfied. It was too slow,too disconnected and a far cry from the always-on, always-connected, endless options of the Internet in 2010.
LONDON, United Kingdom — The fashion film movement has hit the mainstream, with well-known brands like Prada and Y-3 running integrated, cross-channel campaigns around high-impact digital videos and a dedicated Digital Schedule for fashion films and catwalk streams now in place at London Fashion Week.
But there were no signs that the medium was condensing around fixed codes. Quite the opposite. What we saw was the kind of restless innovation and constant evolution that characterises the fluid nature of digital media itself, with an explosion of new films that energised, but also transcended, the seasonal presentation schedule, speaking directly to consumers across the internet as part of in-season digital campaigns.
During the Paris menswear collections, Stefano Pilati opened the Yves Saint Laurent show with “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” a 7-minute film by legendary photographer Bruce Weber, while on the first night of New York Fashion week, a mesmerising film by Nick Knight, featuring Ranya Mordanova in a fractured, postmodern ritual, beautifully complemented Korean designer Jung Kuho’s deconstructed Hexa collection. A week later in London, the British Fashion Council inaugurated a special screening zone at Somerset House for a series of film presentations by young designers like Craig Lawrence, Louise Gray and Katie Eary.
But much of the action took place outside the official fashion week schedule. We saw fashion films inhabiting online advertising units on sites like The New York Times, as well as the emergence of new editorial channels like TEST and NOWNESS, which joined SHOWstudio, Dazed Digital, brand websites, video sharing sites, and Diane Pernet’s international festival, A Shaded View on Fashion Film, as platforms for striking films by avant garde designers and established brands alike.
Last October, we brought you our first seasonal ranking of the Top 10 Fashion Films. This season, the competition was stronger than ever. So sit back, turn up the volume, and enjoy the Top 10 Fashion Films of the Season — and since most of the films are in HD, we recommend you expand the videos to fill your screens with the latest in digital fashion creativity.
(RSS and Email subscribers, click here to view the films).
NEWYORK, United States — Last Friday, BoF attended “Organizing for Digital and Social Media: Metrics, Structure, Culture,” an event with a long name that turned out to be refreshingly succinct. The half-day session at NYU’s Stern School of Business was hosted by Professor Scott Galloway’s thinktank, LuxuryLab, and attended by brands including Burberry, Gucci and Cartier.
Sarah Chubb, President of Condé Nast Digital (US), kicked off the morning, announcing that her team had just submitted a number of iPad applications to Apple in advance of the tablet’s much anticipated arrival (in the US market) later this week. “We want our brands to be wherever people want to consumer them,” said Ms. Chubb, adding that the iPad was the perfect platform for translating the “delicious” experience of print magazines into digital.
Jennifer Aniston by Steven Klein | Source: W Magazine
NEWYORK, United States — In recent seasons, fashion brands have learnt to think like publishers, creating original digital content to earn attention and attract fans who will carry their message across the internet. But the reverse is also true: squeezed by shrinking advertising budgets, traditional content creators like magazines are learning to think like retailers, embracing e-commerce to open new revenue streams and monetise their content.
“Publishers are the number one generators of purchasing intent for brands every day, but are being allocated an ever shrinking amount of ad dollars,” said Philippe von Borries, co-founder and publisher of popular fashion website Refinery29.com.
Indeed, “intent generators” like magazines are losing their fair share of sales revenue to “intent harvesters” like shopping sites at the end of the purchasing process, observes internet entrepreneur Chris Dixon in an insightful blog post entitled “A Massive Misallocation of Online Advertising Dollars.”
Mr. Dixon suggests that better techniques for tracking how publishers generate purchase intent could lead to a more favorable allocation of advertising dollars, allowing content sites to focus purely on producing content. But many magazines are hedging their bets, becoming both “intent generators” and “intent harvesters” by launching their own online shops and integrating them into their editorial platforms.
LONDON, United Kingdom — It was billed as the world’s first truly global fashion show, taking place on the penultimate day of London Fashion Week, beamed live in 3D to five global cities, and streamed to the rest of the world via 73 websites, including Vogue, Grazia and CNN, which all picked up the video feed in a global simulcast. It was undoubtedly the most widely distributed fashion show a luxury brand has ever staged, potentially reaching an audience of more than 100 million users, according to Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts.
At first, I was disappointed that BoF had not been invited to attend the real event at London’s Chelsea College of Art, but in the end I’m glad to have experienced Burberry’s live internet stream. It all felt very 2010, especially as I ducked into the Regent Street Apple Store to watch the show after a late lunch. It was a fashion moment.
NEW YORK , United States — In recent quarters, online sales were the only bright patch in a grim luxury retail landscape. But interestingly, in January of 2009, LVMH-owned eLuxury announced that it would cease e-commerce operations entirely and relaunch as a luxury destination focused completely on content.
Fast-forward one year and the luxury industry still can’t seem to get enough of the internet. Social Media is the phrase on everyone’s lips. And so, it was with great interest that BoF took a sneak peek at the web experience that takes eLuxury’s place — NOWNESS — which will officially launch to the public on Thursday 25 February.
Tuning into a special online preview and connecting with EVP Digital of NOWNESS, Kamel Ouadi, we got the lowdown on what to expect from NOWNESS in the months to come.
Unless otherwise noted, all content, photos and video are the property of Imran Amed. Short text extracts of the content found on this website may be reproduced elsewhere, on the condition that The Business of Fashion is properly credited as the source with a link to the Business of Fashion URL: http://www.businessoffashion.com
Fashion 2.0 | What Fashion Brands Can Learn from Nike
NEW YORK, United States — Fashion brands are finally getting serious about digital media. But so far, their strategies have mostly focused on marketing and communications initiatives like interactive advertising campaigns, fashion films and live-streamed runway shows. Integrating digital technology into the core product offering remains a largely unexploited area of opportunity. Here, fashion companies can learn a lot from one of the world’s most digitally innovative brands: global sportswear giant Nike.
Last month, to coincide with the start of the FIFA World Cup, Nike launched a three-minute film called “Write the Future”, featuring football superstars like Wayne Rooney and Didier Drogba. According to web video analytics company Visible Measures “Write the Future” clocked a record 7.8 million online views in its debut week, underscoring the power of creating compelling digital content that consumers will voluntarily seek out and share with others.
Luxury fashion brands like Chanel have followed a similar strategy, creating their own digital content to earn attention and free media, and learning to think more like publishers in the process. But for all the recent buzz around “Write the Future,” Nike’s long-term digital strategy has focused less on marketing and communications initiatives and more on developing digital product and service platforms.
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Tagged: Chanel – Louis Vuitton – Nike
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