Fashion and Beauty Brands Get Their Knickers in a Twist

It used to be easy: it's 2003 and you're Gucci so you go hire the services of Mario Testino, book a couple of the world's top supermodels, take an edgy and somewhat risque photo and plaster this single image everywhere - which in 2003 meant magazines and posters. Budget $7m

But fast forward to today and it's a very different kettle of fish: take unheard of LA based fashion brand Wren, take equally unheard of film director, Tatia Pilieva, ask friends of the owner of the company to take part in a film where twenty strangers are requested to kiss for the first time and simply caption it, 'Presented by Wren...First Kiss'. 100 million hits later and not many people in their target audience haven't heard of Wren. Budget $1300 ( yes that's thirteen hundred dollars).

Oh how these big fashion and beauty brands long for the old days when people still read magazines, when they could spend months crafting a single image, when their big budgets were a barrier to entry for new upstarts and they didn't have to be always on - 24/7!

Now this darned internet is a huge sponge soaking up all their content and demanding a constant dialogue. What a pain!

Yet they still believe it's some awful aberration which may pass if they have a little lie down and when they get back up, they decide to go bigger - let's get Brad for the Chanel No 5 commercial, pay him the equivalent of the gross national product of Chile and spend massive media dollars to get it on our TV screens. 

But oh dear, what's this, their target audience isn't watching TV anymore and using Brad Pitt is hardly original, and the film only ends up getting a tenth of the views of First Kiss (who by the way spent no media dollars).

I love the internet, it's bloody marvellous!