Brands Create Online Media Outlets to Bypass Magazine Costs & Restrictions

Dots|  Note | Nudity We have two rather ‘snotty’ pieces last week from fashion writers Cathy Horyn and Bridget Foley at WWD about the retail world, lack of creativity, selling sex and — the real elephant stomping in the queen’s bubble bath — (mostly stupid and unqualified) bloggers and digital media that are cutting out the traditional fashion press.

Horyn makes the argument more circumspectly, but both writers are focused on a lack of standards, creativity, and malaise created by Internet culture. Neither makes a strong case for how to correct the situation; that is not the fashion critic’s job.

Neither mentions websites like LVMH’s Nowness.com, which debuts its own films. On the subject of ‘sex sells’ Nowness left the NYTimes in the dust, circumventing America’s morality police and politically correct media, delivering Eniko Mihalik naked in a luxury jewelry editorial.

Google Image search almost put Anne of Carversville out of business last year, when we published Louis Vuitton editorial from Elle Turkey.

Lumping us with the pornographers, Google Images explained that if any mother could be upset by an image, it shouldn’t be in moderate search - luxury brand or no luxury brand.

We suffered to create a new strategy that didn’t depend on American search engines. Today more traffic comes globally on Google than via Google US to our websites. We filter all our sensual images and let the individual countries decide how to classify us.

Best of all 45% of our web traffic is direct and growing 50% since Oct.2010.

Cathy Horyn can condemn the sex sells strategy of LVMH on Nowness.com, but I found it a liberating moment out of America’s sexuality repression tactics.

The great lluxury brands — most of them European at present — or owned by Europeans — don’t want their Internet strategies and communications with customers governed by editors, fashion writers and the global morality police dictating editorial policies in much commercial media, and especially in America.

Growing Communications Brand Power

The power of Nowness.com and other digital media owned by the luxury brands is that they can embrago the latest film on their own websites, waiting 24-48 hours to put it on Vimeo and YouTube. A NYTimes or American Vogue exclusive are no longer lynch pins of the marketing strategy.

Today’s NYTimes business section weighs in with the sobering reality check Brands Create Media Outlets Online, Bypassing Magazines.

Anna Wintour may still turn heads every time she’s near a runway, but frankly commercial products like Net-A-Porter are pointing the way forward not only for fashion, but for publishing as well. The mainstream media have lamented, then celebrated, the digital revolution, but the fact that creating and distributing content is getting cheaper — “Look, Ma, no trucks, no printing presses!” — has not been lost on the brands themselves.

More reading:

WWD Asks ‘Is Fashion An Endangered Species?

New Sensuality | Transversals, Handsome Women Beyond ‘Sex Sells’

New Eroticism | NOWNESS | Eniko Gets Her Rocks On

Magazines Pursue Tablets, but iPad Limits Subscriptions NYT