Vogue + Target + Shazam — a perfect threesome, not to everyone’s taste

Would you put you fourth best runner forward for the Fashion Olympics?

I have been a very bad blogger, so here I am getting back into it! Ever since learning about Shazam’s visual recognition technology when working on a Google campaign, I got curious to see which brand will manage to utilize it and when (we decided against it at the time). On a sidenote – I am a big fan of Shazam and love working with them; what they’re doing with their data – creating value for users and brands – and technology – looking at recognition beyond sound – makes my marketing brains tingle. Low and behold – in this year’s Vogue September issue, Target became this brand, and one of the very, very few brands represented in this issue in both analog and digital form.

Digiday did not wait long before bashing other brands featured in the issue for not being ‘digitally savvy’ enough. Fair point, but let’s take our pink digital glasses off for a second, and look around.

Getting your brand in for a full page spread, let alone a multi-page ad, in the eponymous September Issue is like winning the fashion Olympics: it requires months of preparation, you are exposed to a very judgemental audience and it costs a lot of money. So why would a brand not want to go digital, having gone through all this effort? You’d think it’s pretty easy for Chanel, Dior or Saint Laurent to compliment their print with digital. Wrong. What device would you picture accompanying a woman / man reading a glossy magazine? Correct, tablet or smartphone. The problem is, while some advertisers have somewhat cracked performance marketing on smartphones and tablets, most are still very very far from hitting the branding sweet spot. So, back to the Olympics analogy: would you want to put forward your fourth-best runner when you can put your top guy into the 100m sprint? No, you would not, and this is why big fashion labels are not risking it with mobile. Target, on the other hand, does not have the baggage of legacy and only benefits from creating an association with a strong digital millennial brand like Shazam.

Secondly, any brand manager in their sound mind faced with a choice – there is always a choice, budgets are not made of rubber – between investing an additional $1m into a photo shoot by Steven Meisel featuring Alice Dellal or Gigi Hadid vs. paying a digital agency $1m to run a cool mobile campaign, will go for the photo shoot time and time again. Next, there is the audience factor. I am 150% sure that the media planners behind the campaigns of Chloé, Dior, Chanel and Prada have done their homework on Comescore / GWI and learned that their auduence is probably not interested in discovering their brand on digital, as much as in print. And it’s not a massive surprise – look at Net-a-Porter: a digital luxury e-commerce native, where have they ended up? In print editorial with Porter magazine. Why? Because that’s where the luxury shopper currently enjoys discovering high fashion labels. For now, anyway — because no better alternative has been presented. Target, being a mass market brand, may very well see their audience as more mobile savvy and open to shopping on their smartphones.

Bottom line, and in my personal opinion, not everyone has to do digital, and not all year round.

Moreover, I don’t agree with Digiday’s conclusion that ‘high engagement with Target’s Shazam ad, however, could change the tide for next September’ — it takes much more than one lucky campaign to change the minds of marketers in one of the most conservative industries world-wide.

September is a special time for fashion houses, let them enjoy it with a good old editorial spread.