Swedish retailer H&M has become famous for its collaborations with high-fashion designers, but even by the luxurious standards already set (Jimmy Choo, Roberto Cavalli), tomorrow’s debut of the Lanvin collection is causing major excitement in the fashion world.
The campaign to promote the collection burst onto the Canadian scene this Tuesday, in a hit-and-run style media campaign created by H&M Canada’s MAOY, MediaCom in Toronto. Creating the media strategy presented a unique challenge for the agency, as the entire thing (including the designer) was kept under strict lock and key at global headquarters until the very last minute, MediaCom senior media executive Stacey Najman tells MiC.
‘This designer campaign was different than in previous years because [H&M] was keeping everything a secret. They didn’t announce the designer right away, they released viral videos and people had to guess who the designer was and everything was on a very tight timeline,’ she explains.
‘One of their biggest mandates to us was that they wanted media selection that was impactful and had an element of surprise to it. So we thought what better way to give an element of surprise than to give readers something they’d never seen before.’
That something is a full-size glossy cover wrap of Metro papers in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, markets in which H&M will be releasing the Lanvin collection. H&M is the first fashion retailer to do a glossy cover wrap with Metro, and it is the first full-size execution the paper has done following the debut of the format with a die-cut execution by Febreze (by Starcom) earlier this year.
The high-impact execution provides what will be many people’s first look at the collection, which drops tomorrow at 8 a.m. and is expected to create overnight lineups outside of stores offering it.
‘Our entire campaign that we’ve been running is from Tuesday to Saturday,’ Najman says. ‘It’s been a really short lived campaign and it’s similar to the idea of the designer collaborations in general, because they are in-store for one day and, in a matter of hours, the pieces are gone.’
Given the tight timeline, the bulk of the campaign is digital, Najman says. All OOH is digital, including a digi-board domination at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto, featuring 30-second ads, digi boards in Montreal and Vancouver, and ads in the One Stop network. All digital creative features a countdown banner at the bottom, ticking off the days, hours and minutes until the collection becomes available. Sixty-second spots are also airing in-cinema.
The online campaign, which started on the 16th, was also complex, starting with takeovers on Metro Style, AuFeminin, Elle.com’s Hubpages, Canoe’s Art de Vivre, and BV’s French women’s channel, as well as run-of-site throughout Lou Lou, Flare and MTV websites, Christina Martucci, senior interactive specialist, MediaCom, explained to MiC via email.
That was followed by a mobile, splash-page and homepage takeover rollout over the next three days (including today) across the above-mentioned websites and portals such as Sympatico.ca, and Yahoo Mail. Text message alerts were also blasted out to 5,000 people to build hype for the Saturday event.
