Fashion Notebook

Puma Pumps Up Its Hollywood Jam

Looks like Puma's going Hollywood. 

The fashion athletic company said that it's opening a new office dedicated to entertainment marketing in Los Angeles next month. The West Coast operation will be geared to increasing corporate partnerships and product interaction with music and film celebrities. Can we get a "Sexy Back Speedcat"??!!

Anyways, you know what new offices mean! More staff! Puma USA is adding new roles to fill up the cubes the L.A. office (hey, it might be fashion, but it's all work-a-day office aesthetics, or so we have to believe as we stretch beyond the limits of our three walled container). Ryan Babenzien joins as head of U.S. marketing operations. He was formerly the business development and strategy consultant for Oddcast, New York, a company that does web authoring tools or some other such beep-boop-beep. Ryan Ayanian, who previously worked as a consultant for marketing agency Antenna, Ontario, Canada, has been hired as music marketing manager. And last, but not least (though we admit we have no knowledge of how Puma's hierarchy works) Ed Choi, who joined Puma in 2006 following at stint at ID Agency, Manhattan Beach, Calif., has been named entertainment marketing manager.

For Barney Waters, Puma North America's vp-marketing, the new office is a move to go "fish where the fish are," though he did note that the brand has had a smaller marketing presence on the West Coast for some time.

"These moves represent a recommitment to entertainment marketing as a real driver for the Puma brand," Waters told us over email. "We're also evolving our approach, as there are so many more opportunities beyond product placement. Hollywood is a great place to develop relationships and brand driven content, which can help reach the people that may not be spending as much time looking at traditional media outlets."

Puma has been making inroads with celebrities over the past several years, working on design and advertising projects with rapper Ludacris and socialite-heiress Lydia Hearst-Shaw (we're not saying she's 100%, but she's definitely not like the other socialite-heiresses we can think of. Barf Tinsley Mortimer and Paris Hilton!), among others. This month, Puma unveiled its new TV campaign, featuring cute-but-disposable Scottish singer/songwriter Paolo Nutini (pictured, right, smoking something). Nutini's single, "New Shoes," is being used in Puma’s lifestyle campaign. We were wondering how long it would take for that to get snatched up by the commercial world.

In May, the company will begin promotional tie-ins with the film Speed Racer, which will include a signature shoe, product placement in the movie and worldwide in-store promotional campaigns. BTW... Does anyone remember what exactly Speed Racer, the show, was about, you know besides a boy racing, like, fast? We're trying to recall, but just can't seem to do it. Somehow, this didn't seem like a movie idea to us. But 'tevs, we're not filmmakers. But why not a He-Man movie? Hey, we're just sayin'.

No notes on what they'll be spending this year to pull off these tie-ins and tie-ons. In 2006, Puma spent $13 million on advertising in the U.S., excluding online, down 23% from $17 million in 2006, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

Lessons in Branding: A Night Out with Ben Sherman

Having attended many fashion parties that were no more
than an excuse to down a bunch of free drinks before going
out for your real night on the town, we must admit that most of them are throw-aways, except in the rare instance that they shed some light on some real branding work.

While such is by far the rarest of breed in the Fashion Week party line up, Ben Sherman's party Friday night at the brand's Soho flagship proved to be a rumination on the execution of a rebranding, if not a somewhat nostalgic trip down memory lane for us (pictures left, via LastNightsParty.com).

If you haven't checked in with Ben Sherman in a while you should, because it's likely very different than you remember. The U.S. vp-marketing, Dana Dynamite has been working to give the brand some serious hipster cred, starting out  first with a MySpace site several years ago (one of the first to jump on that now über-popular chuck wagon) and extending relationships with a series of downtown New York nightlife's more  prominent partiers (and all too often, party promoters by default... hey, even hipsters gotta eat!).

Most recently, the brand inked a partnership with Merlin Bronques, a downtown scene photographer á la, but predating MisShapes (R.I.P.) and The Cobra Snake (we're fairly sure about this, facts about these guys are usually anecdotal at best) as well as newcomers like Nicky Digital (if you don't know these names, you're either over 35 years old or need to seriously re-read your Hipster Handbook). Bronques produced a series of stills—in k eeping with his hipster verité styles—of downtown's denizens that were used for a Christmas OOH campaign here in New York.  Alongside Bronques came a slew of other night-lifers, such as the DJ/comic (huh?) Mike Nouveau (who's really a web marketing and ad sales guy for Paper, and prior to that held similar duties over at Rolling Stone, pictured, left, with friends) and DJ Jess (the skinny, seemingly sexually ambidextrous DJ who used to, and perhaps still does, spin at Rififfi, where you can expect to hear "Kids in America" and "Common People" about 1.75 times each hour).

So, at the party, it all became clear how these kids—we have to laugh here a little bit, since we've seen them evolve over the past four years from awkward kids our friends used to hook up with to something of legitimate (?) nightlife figures, and speaking of Merlin, why did you lose the wig!!??—have been perfectly deployed to revamp this aged British apparel brand both on and offline (they all promote each other via MySpace pages).

The party was thronged with young kids (check out all the images, here.), which isn't such a surprising thing at fashion events, particularly during Fashion Week. But it was thronged with the kinds of people that we recognize, obviously a direct appeal to young twentysomethings who make the rounds at various clubs decked out in DIY and bargain fashions. The walls were splattered with images from the current campaign, and the room packed with a bunch of young, mod-ish looking pretties that posed for Bronques' pictures. (Though due diligence requires us to report that there were some aging club queens out as well, but that's par for the course around downtown NYC. It wouldn't feel like home without them.)

And while our friend did note that the new outdoor campaign looked like "American Apparel Lite" (which, to be fair, is, itself pretty much "1970s-Era Gym Porn Lite"), Ben Sherman was effectively communicating its new message. After being off of our radar for years, Ben Sherman suddenly felt hip. And the product wasn't—particularly the party dresses—bad either.

And it's not just our musings either. Agyness Deyn, that pixie-faced model you've been seeing in nearly everyone's campaigns this year, popped into the party, wearing some super high shouldered blue jacket and with a mini-entourage of bottle blonds in tow.  That  surely says something, whether she was comp'ed  for the night or not. Though I'm starting to worry about Agyness as a brand spokesperson—seems she's been a bit of the village bicycle lately and while we love her look, we have to wonder how much Agyness we'll have to see before we get fatigue and move on.

And speaking of moving on, while we love the 1980s, I think it's time we stopped LITERALLY reinterpreting the decadent decade. Seriously, there's a way to pull off hip without being a literal reproduction of a Salt N' Peppa album cover. Cheap, clunky gold chain and patent purses were always passé people!

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?