Fashion Notebook

Penelope Cruz-a-palooza: Mango's First U.S. Campaign Drops in February

Look for a new string of print, outdoor and online ads for
Mango in February 2008.

The Spanish fast fashion retailer will launch its first-ever US campaign this coming February. The creative will feature actress Penélope Cruz, who will continue to be the face of Mango for the spring and summer 2008 seasons. Check out the shots at right (click to enlarge). (In other Cruz news, the actress is currently working "Los Abrazos Rotos," or "Broken Hugs" in English, a new film with her director pal, Pedro Almodóvar, that is due out in 2008.)

The campaign, per Optimedia, New York, follows the launch of the brand's U.S. flagship store in Soho in late November, which brings their stateside store total to 11. The brand plans to open an additional 5-7 doors next year.

"We want to take as much advantage as possible of having Penélope as our brand image for this spring campaign as she represents the Mango style at its top level," Judith Rius, Mango's advertising director, told me recently, adding that the campaign was shot by photo duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Spend on the campaign was not available.

Cruz has gone deep with the brand recently, launching her own collection (designed by the actress in tandem with her sister, Mónica) at Mango in September.

The opening of the flagship store, as well as the plans to roll out a much more aggressive advertising campaign in the U.S. market, reflect the brand's growing investment overseas.

"From now on we are going to invest more in the U.S., and that starts with our new flagship in New York," Rius said. "We are really at the beginning in this country. We have over 200 stores in Spain, and only 11 in the United states so we have a lot more room to grow."

Googling Beauty: Q+A with Google's CPG Sales Head, Kevin Kells

I recently got a chance to sit down with Kevin Kells, Google's
national industry leader f or CPG, over lunch at their cafe-
teria. (BTW/FYI: Google has a "cafeteria" that puts Condé's to shame AND it's free for all the employees. Go ahead, have the salmon!)

Kells (pictured, right) had a lot of interesting things to say about online marketing for CPG brands, and he and his team have been doing a lot of work to break beauty and other CPG marketers from the print/tv spot habit.

Case in point: Google commissioned research firm Harris Interactive to measure the effectiveness of CPG ads (for food, beverage and personal care brands) across traditional TV, the YouTube online video environment and ad-embedded click-to-play video. Turns out those Youtube and Web ads were just as good as the traditional TV spot at driving brand affinity and purchase intent.

Case in point #2: Kell's described one of his favorite case studies to me, in which the Googlers did a campaign for Dove’s Ultimate Clear deodorant, with ads on 271 of Google’s network Web sites and 121 groupings of sites geared toward the 18-34-year-old female target. The effort drove brick-and-mortar sales up 25% during the period. What's more, 96% of that extra boost were new customers for the brand.

But Kells isn't just speaking through his nose. Beauty marketers, he feels your pain. In fact, he used to be one, logging some time in the marketing department over at Revlon, where he handled the Almay brand as  vp-marketing. Before that, he worked over at Unilever and even handled the Guinness account over at Diageo, all before joining up with Team Google in January 2006.

Check out the full story here.

Marketing Ethics in The Valley of the Stardolls

  Stardoll.com, a social-play Web site for 9 to 17 year-old girls, announced this week that it has inked a deal with supermodel/auf'er Heidi Klum to promote her latest jewelry collection.

Essentially, the deal shakes out in a Second Life kind of way. Heidi gets her own store, located in Stardoll's "Star Plaza" shopping center, where the girls can look through her collection, buy "virtual versions" of the product that they can use to bedeck their avatars, and talk shop about fashion. They can even look through Heidi's "closet" of favorite handbags, shoes, clothes and awards show outfits. Oh and she gets this avatar (see right) that doesn't really do graphic justice to Klum's on-screen beauty.

“I don’t just think about it as selling jewelry, [but] I try to make it about who I am,” Klum told me over the phone. “I think it’s great to be in connection with young girls who are interested in fashion . . . It allows [the girls] to interact with those celebrities they are fans of and get an insight into what that person’s favorite clothes are.”

Klum isn't the first to go this way with Stardoll. A partnership with LVMH in December landed DKNY (see store format below) and Sephora in the space, and before that young starlets like Hillary Duff, the Olsens, and Avril Lavigne had also set up shop on the site. And there are more to come! The site, which claims to have 12 million visitors, is seeking other high-end partnerships with brands including Stella McCartney, Vivienne Tam, Liz Claiborne and Henri Bendel.

No doubt, digi-deals like these are already popping up everywhere, but the fact that they're luxury players that are effectively marketing to kids—essentially recruiting future shoppers while their brand loyalties aren't yet set in stone, not to mention further glamorizing a materialist marketplace—seemed just a little bizarre to me.

So I rang up Susan Linn over at the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood to  get her thoughts. Picking a fight, I know, but I thought she might be able to shed some light on this trend.

“The real purpose of social networking sites for young kids like Stardoll, BarbieGirl and even Webkinz and Club Penguin, is to train kids to shop,” she told me. “It’s a good thing for the corporations to make a lot of bucks, but it’s not a good thing for kids. What these companies want to do it get children in the habit of consumption . . . and instill the idea that they deserve luxury products."

But is that Stardoll's fault, really? If we're supposed to stop instilling kids with the idea that they deserve expensive things, why don't we just cancel any number of reality and "scripted reality" shows, not to mention MTV shows like "Cribs" or VH1's "The Fabulous Life Of" series? Certainly those shows glamorize opulent wealth and rampant consumerism.

To whit, Paul Kurnit, president of Kid Shop and a marketing professor at Pace University, told me that the children using sites like Stardoll are already exposed to hyper-consumer culture via television shows like those mentioned above.

“Luxury is aspiration and a lot of those brands and those celebrities are fashion and lifestyle brand badges that today's teen and tween girls want a piece of,” he said, adding that he feels Stardoll does a good job of delivering for both its users and brands.

So, dear reader, what's the verdict? Is Stardoll out of line, or is it merely keeping with the times?