Always a crucial issue in Marshall McLuhan opus, a way to control minds – see David Cronenberg’s hyper-paranoid Videodrome– or something ‘that came and broke your heart’ – ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, The Buggles – video is one of the main characters of the post-postmodern era. Every minute, 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, as reported by the website, generating 3 billion views a day. It would take 412 years to watch all the material submitted on the page. And numbers keep growing.
Now, according to John Cecil, president of Innovate Media, ‘The Web is moving from a text-based medium to a video-based one’.
A recent article reported that, since February 2011, some of the most famous luxury brands - Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Burberry, Gucci, Omega, among others – have opened exclusive branded video channels on China’s leading internet television site, Youku.com.
Although this phenomenon is not completely new – Louis Vuitton opened a branded channel in 2009 – this year saw an explosion of online video campaigns.
Burberry, always innovative andà la page, features on its channel live events, fashion shows and behind-the-scenes videos, generating a staggering one million views on the brand’s Youku.com channel.
According towww.prnewswire.com, ‘The World Luxury Association's 2010-2011 Annual Report ranks China as the second-largest consumer market for luxury goods, accounting for 27% of the global market, ahead of the United States (14%) and second only to Japan (29%). The same report predicts that China will become the world's largest market for luxury brands in 2012’.
Internet and video seem obvious choices, considering that Chinese consumers are usually younger than their fellow ‘fashion victims’ in the rest of the (capitalist) world.
‘Luxury brands are highly selective in terms of the platforms they advertise on and their choice of Youku speaks to the perception of Youku as a premium platform’, said Frank Ming Wei, Senior Vice President of Youku, and one of the happiest blokes in China, at the moment.
Videos are for sure entertaining and cool, but why should a brand consider them as a truly necessary part of the marketing stratedy?
Closing the sale.
‘When a person is about to buy a product, we’re finding that text on a page is not enough to finish the sale or communicate the message’, argues John Cecil;‘It’s an extension of the brand and especially big brands have to use more videos of their products’, he continues. ‘Brands need to think about creating video products specifically for the Web because it gives a great opportunity to close the sale or provide more information’, this is the issue; ’Brands that have an informational video are more likely to get customers to buy because consumers will now know more about products,” Mr. Cecil states, before concluding: ‘If Louis Vuitton had a woman standing on the site talking about how much she liked the purse and showed the features and let the camera look inside of it, then it’s more likely that the brand’s customers would buy it.’
The kids from Dagenham - or, in this case, Nánchāng – part 2.
Talking about Louis Vuitton, the brand seems to feel very comfortable experimenting new solutions: in the last years they teamed up with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, creating new and manga-ish psychedelic version of the classic LV design, and anime-like videos.
David Shrigley’s animations for Pringle of Scotland are just another, similar case in which the brand is using video to engage with a younger, fresher and more casual audience, aka ‘tomorrow’s customers’.
From Burberry – as usual the first to be quoted, in these contexts - to Alexander McQueen, video is the weapon of choice for keeping the users on the page for longer, giving them a daydream-like experience, which eventually turns into a sale.
Personally, I have never been a big fan of fashion – vision of people getting wild during the sales remind me of Dante’s Inferno– although, I have to say, I recently found myself unable to leave Alexander McQueen’s YouTube channel, amazed by the arty/punkish/glossy videos of beautifully weird young people in their bedrooms, somewhere in the suburbs of the UK, wearing the designer’s clothes.