No Man’s Blog

Couple of months ago two clothing/fashion brands wanted you to look at their new collection. And they both doing it in a very interesting way. One was very innovative but complex, the other was no new-news but very simple and slick.

I thought it’s be nice to compare their performance, mainly from a social media traction point of view.

Diesel one hundred lovers – In case you’ve missed this awesome piece – inspired by Goddard’s “Bande a Part” movie, the video features 100 lucky selected people re-creating the famous dance. Based on special stop-motion technique, the lovers appearing in the video rapidly change, along with their clothes, all while appearing to continue to smoothly follow the choreography of the dance. The video is fully interactive: you can pause it, rolling over individual items to get further product information, buy them online and also find information about the people featured; allowing anyone to link into their activities and interests on their social network personal pages – making it the world’s most awesomely social interactive fashion catalog.

Utweet from Uniqlo, one of the most culturally digital brand out there, known for their simple ideas and slick execution. UTweet simply puts a funky little song and dance to your recent tweets, running them through several animations and as your stream is running so do some beautiful people wearing Uniqlo t-shirts.

There is very little to compare between these two projects, however, going back to the core of their initial objective (get people to see our new and interact with our brand products) both seem to have done well but in a slightly different way.

Note: one big unknown here is any media spend.

From what I was able to gather (using different tools and public data)

Diesel a hundred lovers:

187 blog posts

11 news items

378 related tweets

Over 1 million views of the final video

uTweet

456 blog posts

15 news items

27,947 tweets (!!!)

uTweet plays – ? (this one is key – can anyone help me find this data?)

Conclusions:

1. Be awesome - both brands created slick beautiful executions that once seen is hard not to interact with.

2. Do something with people – when you approach your brief with the question “what can we do with the people we want to reach” (insted of what can we say to people) you are bound to come up with much more interesting, engaging answers that actually bring value to both people and brand.

3. Personal instant gratification is key to spreadability – ‘conversation wise’ (i’m doing my best to avoid using viral here) it looks like uTweet had much more traction on public social platforms (blogosphere and twitterverse). It have reached millions of people by letting people have some fun with their social stream. Nothing innovative but admirable simplicity, playfulness and very slick execution made people happy and they couldn’t help but shouting about it. Simple, slippy ideas win.

4. Being culturally digital pays – as I mentioned earlier there is nothing innovative about uTweet. If you want to be even more critical abuot it you could even say they are taking the piss – making you to look at their clothing through your visually pimped twitter stream. But the fact that it’s Uniqlo and the culture of anticipation they have created over the years with their beautifully crafted digital toys made it one of the most successful campaigns of the year. Very few brands could have managed to pull out something like that and take home millions of mentions/ interactions.