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.
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Tags: awards, Burberry, cannes, Cannes Lions, comment, cyber, digital, Dior, fashion, fuelband, integrated, Nike, nike plus, online, Prada, stefan olander, titanium, video
fashion and mash 
Key fashion week trend: social media quality
16 OctThere’s a lot to be said for the level of quality our industry is producing over social media these days, and rightly so for a world that prides itself on luxury. Whatever it is – better cameras, bigger teams, more budget – it’s working.
Take a look at some of the content highlights from the most recent round of fashion weeks:
In order: Burberry, Tory Burch, Chloé, Prada and Dolce & Gabbana (as highlighted individually last season), all with beautiful executions across multiple platforms.
In terms of cameras, partnerships with tech companies for Burberry and Tory Burch have undoubtedly helped. The former, as reported at the time, teamed up with Apple (ahead of the news this week of CEO Angela Ahrendt’s move to become Apple’s senior vice president of retail and online stores) to exclusively capture its social media content using the new iPhone 5S iSight camera. This meant incredibly high res images, not to mention benefits including auto image stabilisation, a new ‘burst’ mode that allows users to shoot 10 photos per second, as well as an option for slow-motion.
Tory Burch on the other hand partnered with Sony to shoot its show using the F55 professional 4K camera, resulting in content with four times the resolution of standard high definition video. A detailed view of each and every look was hosted at runway.toryburch.com.
Meanwhile, we’re also seeing those in attendance at the shows sharing higher quality imagery too. Yes there are still blurry runway shots, but better smartphone cameras are of course at the root of this improving. That said, there are two other factors helping this along too:
The first is down to designers increasingly creating scenes for the crowd to want to capture. As Elizabeth Holmes of the WSJ reported: “Designers have a few tricks – falling under the heading ‘Instabait’ – to create moments that even hard-to-impress fashion week veterans can’t help but click and post.” These vary from elaborate set designs and props, to celebrity showcases.
The BoF covered this during the menswear shows in July too, writing: “In recent seasons, it’s become increasingly common for fashion shows to end with a tableau of models, perfectly positioned to be snapped and shared on social media. But at the most recent round of Paris menswear and couture shows, the staging of these instantly sharable moments rose to a whole new level of sophistication.”
A second factor that might begin shaping this lean towards quality all that much further, was hinted at by Tommy Hilfiger this season. As previously covered, it offered up a service that delivered assets – pictures through to collection information – upon request to showgoers over email in real-time. The aim was to “allow the industry to curate and share a new layer of exclusive, customised content on their own digital platforms for their followers during the show”. Doing so however cleverly put Tommy Hilfiger back in charge of the look and feel of its brand in the social space, ensuring its quality was as on-brand as possible throughout.
It might be a week for talking about technology, innovation and where the two cross with fashion thanks to that news from Burberry and Apple, but it’s important to ensure nailing content and quality likewise gets the attention it deserves. Overall the result is undoubtedly a better experience for the consumer so long may it continue. And for once, long may other industries be inspired by just how well (and by that we mean beautifully) ours can do digital.
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Tags: #NYFW, Burberry, Chloe, content, design, designer, digital, Dolce & Gabbana, Facebook, fashion, fashion week, Instagram, LFW, mfw, pfw, Pinterest, Prada, quality, runway, social, social media, Tommy Hilfiger, Tory Burch, Tumblr, Twitter