Luxury brands are increasingly removing content from their social media feeds. Balenciaga first wiped clean its Instagram grid last June, to prepare for unveiling its first haute couture collection in 53 years, and has since continued the practice.
Meanwhile, some fashion influencers are also curating their feeds: leading creators to opt to remove sponsored posts after a period of time, unless brands are willing to pay more.
As a result, marketers are moving towards the use of ephemeral content, which is shown for a shorter period of time, sometimes less than 24 hours, before deletion. Evergreen campaigns which focus on high-quality content used to be the marketer’s strategy of choice. As Nadia Tuma-Weldon, lead of global luxury practice at McCann Worldgroup, says , brands are now having to work harder than ever to appear new and fresh. “There’s a lot of pressure to capture a youth audience and every marketer is just scrambling to figure out how to get their attention. If you work in fashion, your competition is not the next clothing or shoe brand — it’s the entire internet.”
This prominent shift has been driven by social platforms, says Cody Eastmond, senior director of digital marketing at Science Magic, which works with Versace, Canada Goose, Tiffany & Co. and Glossier among others. One important media-based platform, Instagram, is encouraging its’ users to share and engage with ephemeral short-form video content; as their competition with Tik Tok ensues. “These platforms are allowing people to show their personality a bit more,” says Eastmond. “Social media, and especially fashion, has been very curated for a long time. People used to care about how their feed images look all together but there wasn’t necessarily personality there. Since the rise of Instagram Stories, brands are having to act more like individuals.”
Benefits of a Blank Canvas...
So, what are the advantages of short-term marketing you may ask? Well, ephemeral content allows brands to be a little more lo-fi and in the moment. Ephemeral content from a runway show or shoot is engaging and is more likely to prompt conversation than a carefully curated post that looks like it is straight from a catalogue. Think about it, you get a fleeting glimpse into the world of fashion on a runway. Somehow it almost feels like you’re there, like it is accessible to you. Most importantly, it feels as if you are included in the brand’s “life”, essentially humanising the brand.
According to Brittany Xavier, a digital creator and entrepreneur with 4.3 million followers on Tiktok, brands are being asked to pay substantially more for a permanent feed post than for a short-lived one. She charges brands up to 50 per cent more. In some cases, the fee can rise by up to 100 per cent, says Idalia Salsamendi, a brand and influencer strategist, who has consulted for Dior, Chopard and Valentino. “As a brand you’re probably going to be doubling costs if you’re asking for a more permanent post, even if it’s an influencer’s Instagram highlights, because that content is living for exponentially longer,” she says.
“When we look at casting influencers, we often look at which other brands they align themselves with. If we look at someone and see lots of different brand posts, it can sometimes feel a bit too pay-for-play.” says Eastmond. So, it is also in the influencer’s best interest to avoid overcrowding their feed with sponsored content.
The more partnerships appear in a creator’s feed, the more it decreases their bankability, agrees Thomas Repelski, co-founder and CEO of Lefty, a Paris-based influencer and analytics firm. “Brands, especially luxury ones, like to enter into exclusive relationships with influencers who have few or no visible partnerships.”
Repelski states that brands will not miss out if an influencer deletes sponsored content within a few days. “In-feed posts have a limited lifetime: after eight hours they would have generated about half of their total number of impressions. After 24 hours, it would be 80 per cent. After 48 hours, more than 90 per cent,” he says.
However, more traditionalist experts argue that ephemeral content contradicts the core meaning of luxury, which has built its values on heritage and in-depth storytelling. Social media’s purpose is to create a door to access. Ultimately, social media’s focus on ephemeral content is creating a new sense of urgency for these brands. It is now imperative for them to think carefully about how they tell their stories. People use Instagram as the shop window to their brands, but when you compare this to how often retailers change their physical store windows, it makes sense to change social media content frequently too.
Comments