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Herewith, the final post created for PAN in Rome. I re-post it today on Signalwriter because, you know, we all need more beauty in our lives. The subject matter is much more natural in the Italian version.
Americans are even more aware of another Italian name – or at least a face: Elizabetta Canalis. She is currently George Clooney’s girlfriend* so there’s plenty of envy to cover both sides of the human race, male and female.
Why does this matter to advertising people? Because Ms Canalis is currently starring in ads and videos for fashion designer Roberto Cavalli – her second year in the lead role. Since Italian fashion gets as much marketing attention as Italian cars, the new Roberto Cavalli print campaign, photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, has gained celebrity attention worldwide. (If there’s a fashion or gossip blog on the planet that hasn’t already posted about this, it must be in Iran.)
Americans slowly began to learn about this particular cutting-edge campaign from the London Daily Mail, where Italian designer Cavalli said, “For my new underwear collection I chose Elisabetta again, my ideal of a woman…she was perfect in enhancing the spirit of this advertising campaign!”
But we know more about Cavalli since he’s a major presence on a popular US TV program, “America’s Next Top Model,” on the Warner Bros./CBS broadcast network The CW. It is one more demonstration that there are no real borders between marketing, advertising, public relations and entertainment, at least in the consumer marketplace.
The photographs ain’t bad either.
*Are Clooney and Canalis together in a Fiat ad? Perhaps here. Photo of: Elizabetta Canalis © Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott for Roberto Cavalli – all rights reserved.
Op also says it is “The Original California Lifestyle Brand.” When I realized that the brand on the swimsuit I bought at Walmart for the Panama Canal cruise comes from a familiar company, I felt, like, all mellow. Dude.
I closely non-resemble the brand demographic, representatives of which appear in the Op ad on this page. In fact, check out the Op brand site and you’ll see just how non-similar these happy youngsters are to moi.
That’s okay – there’s room for a lot of brands in the world. I’m just intrigued that Op is owned by Iconix Brands. The last time I wrote about one of this company’s brands, it was London Fog® trenchcoats.
This post’s about cool-dude-beachwear branding and I’m proud to have the chance to re-examine the brand-holder. Inconix bought the Op brand – Ocean Pacific – about four years ago for $54 million and has revived it rather nicely. But then, that’s what Iconix is famous for – being a licensing dynamo and all. The company has a whole bunch for great and busy retail marques, including the Joe Boxer®, Badgley Mischaka®, Mossimo® and Candie’s® brands – the current “Candie’s Girl” is Britney Spears.
The self-proclaimed Iconix biz-model is using licensing to generate predictable revenue streams (thanks to contractually guaranteed minimum royalty payments) combined with trendsetters in aggressive advertising and promotion. Good, bad or ugly, the beautiful people – Spears, Eva Longoria Parker, Madonna, etc. – do generate attention.
Iconix Brands also seems quite smart about keeping certain brands in strict channels and mindsets. Op is for Walmart. Mudd® apparel is available only at Kohl’s. Rocawear, per the website, “was established…off of the meteoric success of co-founder Shawn ‘Jay Z’ Carter…to fit the urban lifestyle and…street-savvy consumers.”
What happens in most all of the Iconix brand demographics hardly ever touches me and my life. And any suggestion that my Op swim trunks are too young for me will be met with knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud agreement.
For a marketer and advertiser, though, I applaud what Iconix Brands is doing at both wholesale and retail – you might want to look into just how brand-savvy the company really is. And cool or not, I’m running away to sea. Later, dudes…
Now that corporate brands are dropping Tiger Woods like a swine with sniffles – and after I’ve been writing about celebrity endorsements in blog posts like this – the Feds have “accidentally” created a new, fresh personality.
Attention, shoppers: There are six bright new billboards for Indian retailer Benzer on the Advertising…Made Easy blog today – the rest are just as vivid as the one shown here. I got the word from the campaign’s copywriter, Sunil Shibad.
He wrote me, “Benzer is a high-end couture brand headquartered in Mumbai. Indian women by and large like to stick to traditional ethnic wear. The new collection had a Western touch to it and the brief was to position the Benzer women as a femme fatale.”
Shibad worked with Icecube Design and Film CD Rafeeq Ellias (who also photographed the campaign’s Spanish model) and Art Director Mangesh Rane to get these done.
I have enough fashion sense to thinly coat one side of a dry piece of toast, no one will be surprised to hear this. I do know eye-popping billboards when I see them, though. These outdoor executions qualify big-time: Bright colors, snappy headlines (way to go, Sunil) and very stylish outfits. Good international appeal, too, including the tagline.
It’s such an arresting campaign I wish Benzer applied the concept to its website. But I understand the retailer has to appeal to an immense range of consumers. Only a few customers would wear the high-end fashions but everyone can be influenced by the vivacious look-and-feel of a leading brand. Even at a distance of 9,000 miles.
They’re everywhere – celebrity endorsers for each of us and all of us. Now there’s a fresh Harris Interactive/AdWeek poll that says:
…one in five Americans (21%) say they find athletes to be most persuasive when they endorse a product, followed by 18% who say TV or movie stars are most persuasive, 14% who say singers or musicians and 10% who say former political figures are most persuasive.
When it comes to how other celebrities rank in the category of least persuasive, almost one-quarter (23%) say TV or movie stars are least persuasive, while 14% say business leaders are least persuasive. Just 13% say when athletes endorse a product they find them least persuasive and 11% say singers or musicians are least persuasive.
It’s clear that the pollsters took no account of the “Trench Coat Factor.” TCF ramps up the cool quotient – even for McGruff the Crime Dog. You knew that. Best for Sunday…
When I was growing up, trench coats did not look like this. Even London Fog trench coats didn’t look like this. Even so, I was shaken (if not stirred) to discover that the much touted Gisele Bündchen ads for this classic fashion line did not show up on the brand’s website.
Or maybe the print ads made it to mags like Vanity Fair; for general web consumption though, we get Eva Longoria Parker and her spousal unit.
So…it’s March 7, 1954: Saks Fifth Avenue becomes the first store to offer London Fog raincoats, in a New York Times ad. The new line of men's raincoats, from Londontown Clothing Company, is specifically designed to reflect the style of World War I trench coats – complete with epaulets, sleeve straps, and a belt.
The Saks ad describes the coat as “The perfect answer to everything a man can ask for in a raincoat. Remarkably lightweight and wrinkle-free ... it actually resists creasing even after packing.”
(The Londontown president, Israel Myers, has grudgingly used the brand name London Fog for the new line; he rejected it originally because he didn’t think it would attract customers. Saks’s 100 coats sold out immediately, even though the $29.75 price tag was more than double that of other men’s raincoats.)
Myers didn’t invent the trench coat – that’s down to the Brits in the Great War; as you can see by this 1932 Sears ad, the “durable trench
model” retailed for just $2.98. Twenty years and a miracle DuPont fabric later, Saks charged 10 times that.
Today, Dillard’s advertises the woman’s model London Fog “Long Trench Coat” in stone, garnet, chocolate or black, for $99 in The Houston Chronicle. I noticed that, oddly, there was no Bündchen here. (But plenty more of her here. Ah – advertising!)
