Fashion advertising has turned a corner, and brands are trying hard to stay current when it comes to changing platforms and a new type of customer. On this week’s Glossy Podcast, two veterans in the fashion advertising space, Lloyd and Co. executives Doug Lloyd and Jodi Sweetbaum, joined us to discuss why brands in the fashion world are finding it difficult to get the basics right.
Edited highlights below.
Fashion advertising remains complicated
The days of a big downtown billboard are over. Advertising is more complicated today, with a multitude of mediums to choose from and a new focus on storytelling. Lloyd calls this a “work in progress,” saying that fashion brands often suffer from not embracing the digital space fully. “It’s about finding the space that brands can communicate with in a way that’s natural,” he said.
At the same time, brands need to slow down.
New ways to advertise and create brands emerge every day. But fashion is a unique industry compared to others, in that the product itself changes, very materially, much more often. There may be a different shirt, or no shirts at all, three months later — and the changing fashion calendar makes that even more complicated. But when a brand is telling a story, the challenge is to “continue the conversation with the consumer and not change everything up all the time,” said Sweetbaum.
PR and marketing need to realize they need each other.
Fashion marketing has often really been about PR: a well-shot Vogue spread or a cool chatbot effort that offers little in the way of actionable data but does generate plenty of buzz. This is a definite issue in the brand space, said Sweetbaum — adding that, increasingly, there is a “blur” between marketing and PR. “The two need each other,” she said, because digital means an increased need to come up with a “big idea that filters into everything the brand does.” Big fashion houses, thus, need to move more quickly and get rid of internal silos to be successful, she said.
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