Could this be the year fashion makes its mark at Cannes Lions?

There was a great article written by Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer of AKQA, for AdAge last year about why Cannes Lions, the international festival of creativity – otherwise known as advertising’s biggest global awards – trumps SXSW in terms of content.

“At events like SXSW, there is a lot of information. And information can become useful knowledge for marketers. However, what really moves people is inspiration. And that’s where Cannes keeps its edge for marketers. While SXSW may be about informing and finding that Next Big Thing, Cannes’ focus has been about pushing this industry of ours forward,” he says.

It reflects my own sentiments exactly. I’m well versed in both, but Cannes likewise wins for me* largely because of both the curation and the quality of its content. This is the place where true leaders come together to share not only best in class work, but overarching ideas and thoughts for the future of this space.

It’s a week where inspiration is utterly abound (alongside copious vats of rosé of course). Speakers over the last couple of years have spanned former US president Bill Clinton, Malcolm Gladwell, Robert Redford, Sir John Hegarty, Alain de Botton, Patti Smith, Aaron Sorkin and more.

Yet it’s SXSW that the fashion industry has managed to get a good grip on in terms of its relevance to them – all manner of luxury brands and major retailers have been in attendance these past couple of years, as I’ve previously covered, to source both content and opportunities for partnerships within the largely tech-focused world. Of course at SXSW there are now huge volumes of agency folk too, and at Cannes an increasing number of technology companies.

Two years ago I wrote this article about the significant lack of fashion presence throughout Cannes. It focused on the fact that fashion communications remained largely about print ads selling product over campaigns selling ideas, a viewpoint I still hold at large, but certainly one that is beginning to shift. In doing so, it’s sparking more relevance than ever for these brands to start making an appearance at Cannes, both on the delegates list and in those nominated for awards.

The great news is, 2013 looks like the year that might take shape.

Just announced is news that Burberry CCO Christopher Bailey will take to the stage on the Friday of the festival (it runs from June 16-22) to talk about “digital’s creative revolution” with Google’s head of marketing, Lorraine Twohill. From the write-up, as well as prior news from Google, that event will be the kick off for another impressive digital project from the brand.

Burberry is one of a number, alongside adidas and Volkswagen, involved in Google’s Art, Copy & Code initiative, a follow-up to its Project Re-Brief last year. This is “a series of projects and experiments to show how creativity and technology can work hand in hand”.

The write-up for the session at Cannes adds: “How do you engage your audience when ad views are voluntary? What happens when the physical and digital worlds intersect? How can data enable creativity? What if ads didn’t have to look or feel like ads? The only way to find the answers is through risk taking and experimentation.”

[Side note here as to Google's subtle but increasing infiltration into the fashion industry across all aspects of its business - way beyond just search].

Elsewhere at Cannes there are other fashion types in attendance too – Vivienne Westwood speaking with SapientNitro to “de-construct the narrative behind some of the most innovative stories of all-time”, and photographer Annie Leibovitz as part of a panel discussing the “genesis, evolution and continued success of the global ‘Disney Dream Portraits Series’.”

Watch this space…

And do also keep an eye out for the free daily live-streams being offered from the festival for the first time this year… there will undoubtedly be some good ones to choose from.

*Full disclaimer: I am employed by the same parent company as Cannes Lions. My opinion would stand regardless.

Shoppable videos from Only Jeans and ASOS awarded at Cannes Lions

As a follow up to the post on learnings from Cannes Lions yesterday, I wanted to highlight a couple of initiatives from the fashion industry based on shoppable videos that did, in fact, walk away with awards.

 

First up is The Liberation, an online interactive film by Danish denim brand Only Jeans. It won a gold Lion in the cyber category. http://onlybecausewecan.com/

Described as a “fashion catalogue, movie, game, music video, and the world’s first on demand, online, video, retail environment”, it allowed users to click and freeze the film, turning it into an interactive catalogue. From there, they could browse, like, pin, tweet and buy.

Created for girls aged 16-25, it also pushed an element of gaming – encouraging consumers to interact with the story by, for instance, “stealing” a pair of virtual jeans. For a lucky few, they were then sent out in reality and for free. The initiative, created by agency Uncle Grey, culminated in a bespoke catalogue listing each of the items the user had browsed so they could revisit their choices, share and shop again.

The video saw 280,000 unique visits within two weeks, and led to a 442% increase on interaction with Only.com

 

Another gold Lion, this time in the design category, went to ASOS for its Urban Tour campaign. As previously reported, this was a “viral, digital and social feat comprised of a series of shoppable films showcasing the online retailer’s autumn/winter 2011/12 collection”. It was also the online retailer’s first initiative aimed at men.

Created by BBH London, it was built on the premise that men are influenced by their peers and people they admire, rather than traditional fashion sources. The focus therefore turned to culture, sports and the street. As a result, the films featured performance artists from around the world – in London it was five of the best street dancers (as shown above), elsewhere it was musicians, skaters and more. Each could be clicked on to enable the e-commerce functionality built in.

The initiative gained 7.36m global views in just 11 weeks, and led to an additional 500,000 men visiting ASOS.com within three months. A total of 14% of viewers purchased within seven minutes of watching the content.

I have to say I actually remain to be convinced by shoppable videos, but these stats and the Cannes Lions awards suggest they might well have a future after all. Watch this space…

Fashion industry can still learn from big winners at Cannes Lions

You may well have already seen that Nike+ FuelBand scooped the biggest awards at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – a week-long event held in June celebrating the best in advertising from around the world.

A wristband that measures your everyday activity, it won the coveted Titanium and Cyber Grand Prix for the way in which it goes a step beyond technology and inspires consumers to act.

As Stefan Olander, vice-president of digital sport at Nike, said during the festival: “Technology is no longer remarkable, it’s what we do with it and how we do it that’s unique.”

That comment is a nice follow up to an article I wrote for the Huffington Post last year calling for the fashion industry to be more creative in their campaigns; to produce work worthy of winning at Cannes.

“Fashion – an industry with creativity at its very core – needs to shake off its seasonal collection focus and start thinking instead about campaigns built around big ideas,” it read.

Since then, there’s been a lot of innovation from brands and retailers, especially when it comes to technology; quirky Pinterest campaigns, multiple app launches and much play with augmented reality.

But, as essentially suggested by Olander (and in my Huff Po piece), there still needs to be less focus on technology for technology’s sake, and more on overarching campaigns that solidify brand purpose.

Paul Kemp-Robertson, editorial director at Contagious Communications, emphasised the same during Cannes: “Normal people don’t care about the technology, they care about what comes out of it: the experience.” He suggested marketers need to forget about the “dude we should…” philosophy; “dude we should do an app”, or “dude we should launch a QR code” for instance. There’s little benefit in becoming obsessed with doing something just because everyone else is, he explained.

Accordingly, it’s all very well launching on Pinterest, so too is it understandable to push out a seasonal video, but when those initiatives just end up as another example of products over ideas, it not only gets boring for the consumer, but ultimately unsuccessful in terms of ROI.

Some are doing it right. For one, the increasing focus on film has resulted in some outstanding creative work. The new Roman Polanski-directed short for Prada is a great example – despite the fact focus is so heavily on a jacket from the recent collection, the viewer is entirely distracted by the storyline.

I also love Dior’s Secret Garden Versailles spot; it fits beautifully with the image of the brand, even though strictly speaking it has little in the way of a tale to go with it.

The rest of the autumn/winter 2012/13 ads are also just starting to drop, so here’s hoping there’ll be more that push the envelope beyond the typical product focus of print imagery. Unsurprisingly, Burberry is already proving a great example with its multimedia campaign, celebrating both its brand and London through “imagery, film, music and weather”.

The question is, were any of them to be entered at Cannes, would they win? I for one would love nothing more than the likes of a Calvin Klein or Marc Jacobs or even a Chanel initiative sweeping the ceremonies at the Palais one day… here’s hoping.

Fashion communications should be based on selling ideas not products

I wrote this blogpost after returning from Cannes Lions this year – it was recently published on the all-new Huffington Post UK

There’s no escaping the overwhelming association with luxury in Cannes. Star-studded hotels sit next to boutiques from every designer name you can imagine: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, Prada. Balenciaga too, Céline coming soon.

But head inside the Palais des Festivals in June for the world’s most famous advertising festival, Cannes Lions, and there’s barely a whisper of the fashion industry at all. In a celebration of the best in campaigns from around the globe, some of the most creative brands existing, are distinctly absent.

The obvious answer is budget. Traditionally, fashion not only doesn’t do big scale advertising (TV), but doesn’t, of course, work with ad agencies. Who needs a creative director from Madison Avenue, when you have one in Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs or Christopher Bailey in-house?

Print has always been their home. Seasonal campaigns that tie in with seasonal collections. Bold concepts whittled down to a beautiful aesthetic portrayed through a couple of models and an exotic set. Glossy magazines as premium placement, the odd outdoor billboard and the glittering flagship store.

But advertising has changed. Consumers have changed.

Cannes Lions rebranded for 2011 from the prosaic International Advertising Festival to the International Festival of Creativity, to reflect that. Advertising, once clear-cut in definition, can now encompass anything from an experience to new technology, from the use of social media to an event. More often than not, it’s all those things together.

Proof lies in this year’s winners. Yes, Nike’s epic Write the Future spot took the film grand prix, but it was the likes of Decode Jay-Z with Bing, which had no TV attached to it, that cleaned up.

Taking Jay-Z’s new autobiography and leaking it page by page – printing it in inventive spaces such as the bottom of a swimming pool and a vintage Cadillac Seville car – it then released a series of clues online for a month as to each page’s whereabouts, a ruse which saw fans scrabbling to find them in a Bing-enabled scavenger hunt.

It’s in this integrated realm fashion could do well. On a smaller scale, early adopters are already proving such; taking their glossy seasonal campaigns and using them to spark conversation around the brand both on and offline.

“Content” is the new buzzword, with behind-the-scenes footage, viral teasers and fully fledged online films becoming popular formats.

Prada’s spring/summer 2011 effort for instance, won the top spot on The Business of Fashion’s list of fashion films for the season for its “infectious charm and masterfully executed quick edits”. It also worked wonderfully in the interactive banner space, and translated equally well to print.

Meanwhile, for autumn/winter 2011/12, Mulberry brought its campaign stills by Tim Walker to life in a film created retrospectively through the use of numerous CGI techniques.

And Chanel, one of the masters of the teaser spot, even launched a full 30-minute piece around its cruise collection in May called The Tale of a Fairy.

Then there are the more creative integrations – the cunning of a previous Calvin Klein Jeans billboard inviting us to unlock its censored ads through a QR code; or Burberry’s experiential videos allowing viewers to rotate, pause and change perspective through the use of motion-responsive technology.

But, regardless of such clever executions, the basis for each is still (in the main) that print imagery. Fashion communications remain about print ads selling product over campaigns selling ideas. And that is what needs to change.

Sir John Hegarty, worldwide creative director at advertising agency BBH, told a brimming auditorium at Cannes Lions the future is about doing something different. In a telling demonstration he ran a series of beauty industry ads. With their taglines removed, it was almost impossible to tell which was which.

The same could be said for fashion. By the time you’ve seen the collection, heard about the designer’s inspirations and remembered which photographer they’ll use, you can almost even predict the look of the ads before they’re released.

Hegarty referred to this homogenisation as “windtunnel marketing”, and called for a change in approach.

Denim labels, in that case, offers a lot to be learnt from. Ditching the idea of seasonal ads, Diesel launched its Be Stupid campaign in 2010. Based on taking risk, being spontaneous and saying yes, it’s a philosophy spawned from president and founder Renzo Rosso’s experiences in first launching the brand. It won the outdoor grand prix in Cannes last year.

The tagline has remained since, but the ads – often somewhat risqué themselves – are frequently updated: new models, new product, new multimedia executions.

The same can be seen with Go Forth, the long-term campaign from Levi’s, and the brand’s first global creative platform in its 138-year history. Based on a rally cry for positive change in the world, the latest instalment includes a 60-second film called Levi’s Legacy that was unveiled last week (though has been postponed in the UK following riots across the country).

This kind of big thinking for an apparel brand not only makes a campaign more relevant to different hemispheres when launched internationally, but ties in well with the fact collections are becoming increasingly transseasonal.

Accordingly, while the Cannes Lions rebranding might have taken the focus off traditional formats, it doesn’t rid us of the fact that overarching ideas are what advertising remains about, especially in the new digital age, where execution can overshadow concept.

Fashion therefore – an industry with creativity at its very core – needs to shake off its seasonal collection focus and start thinking instead about campaigns built around big ideas.

A good starting point for inspiration, you could say, is Cannes Lions.

Digital snippets: Tom Ford, Net-a-Porter, Apple, Gilt Groupe, Anna Wintour

Some more great stories from around the web surrounding all things fashion and digital this week:

 

• Tom Ford releases video lookbook of his autumn/winter 2011/12 collection (as above) [YouTube]

• Net-a-Porter launches “live” app, lets you see what others are buying around the world [Daily Telegraph]

• Apple takes over the fashion C-suite [FT Material World]

• Gilt Groupe to launch upscale, full-price men’s fashion website called Park & Bond [JustLuxe]

• P& G opens Facebook stores for Tide, Gillette, Olay, Gain, CoverGirl, Luvs and Febreze [Social Commerce Today]

• LA boutique American Rag installs rearview cameras in fitting rooms [The Cut]

• And in case you missed it (how could you), Anna Wintour’s five word acceptance speech at the Webbys: “Sometimes… geeks can be chic” [Fashionista]

In other news – this blog will be on a bit of a mini hiatus while I hit up Cannes Lions next week. Hopefully lots of exciting things to report back thereafter…