Dior Dips it's Toes into Viral Video with Lady Dior Bag Campaign
It's already hitting big as we predicted in 2005, the fashion industry is evolving to film. LVMH goliath steps into the online viral video era with a film focused on the reinvented Lady Dior bag by Christian Dior. The Dior house movement into an online viral video campaign is a sign of their target on the digital demographic.
This first film stars actress Marion Cotillard, as she races through Paris with reflections throughout the film of the elements of the Lady Dior bag: the bag's quilting refered to by the girders on the Tour Eiffel, the film noir monochrome color pallette matching the bag, and main product shot at the opening of the film with the bag a table. The main product shots are also on the Eiffel tower elevator and girders in hot pursuit by several mobsters.
The film opens with Marion Cotillard urgently requesting to leave otherwise a man will be in serious danger. The bag takes center stage when Marion is requested to "open the bag" revealing the contents of the bag to be several different keychains with various sized keys on it. The plot thickens with intermittant shots of a man trapped in a room in front of a telephone unable to make a call because his hands are tied. The video leads to the second part with the entrace of "Lady Rouge" a tall blonde who unscrews the lock on the door where the man is trapped.
We have to admit however, we were disappointed in not having any video controlls on the flash website, which lead to a jerkey start and stop viewing the film. Had they used controlls, we could have let the entire film download on pause, and had a seamless viewing of the film starring Marion Cotillard. Clearly, Dior are still catering to high speed internet markets and not taking into consideration for example, China, where bandwidth is limited in allocation to foreign video sources.
We believe that luxury brands have been loath to enter into the social media and viral market due to the missing "luxury feel" to the web 2.0 tools. Luxury brands and the general fashion populous prefer fashion animation over blogs, wiki, and youtube experiences. This is seen clearly by Dior not including the traditional embed text on the page, but rather a "copy the link" text allowing the viewer to save the code to their computer clipboard, "hiding" from the consumer's eye the "ugly" video hosting platform text used behind from cluttering up the screen.
We predicted that fashion would be moving from still photos to video in 2005 and the need for branded video distribution channels for high quality viral video distribution. We expect now to see more and more companies entering into their own branded TV experience and exploring various different online video distribution platforms. The question we have is how long it will take for brands to realize they can controll their brand image by using these tools and still capitalize on the viral video demographic leaving the television off and viewing media online. When brands realise that they can see the number of times a video has been viewed around the world from their very own backoffice, will they start releasing their content in high quality online to be shared with the digial semi-professional press? And will their emerge one online portal where these fashion videos are posted in one place?
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