The Media Equation
By DAVID CARR
Published: January 16, 2011
In the not-so-distant past, a luxury brand like Richemont, the Swiss company that owns Piaget, Dunhill and Montblanc, would have killed for even the slightest attention from Jeremy Langmead, the editor of British Esquire.
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Now, he works for them, building a menswear e-commerce site.
Luxury brands have always advertised in the likes of Vogue, Esquire and Architectural Digest and tried to impress their editors enough to get mentioned in the editorial pages, as well. But now companies like Richemont are reaching out directly to consumers — and cutting out the middlemen.
Last year, Richemont acquired control of Net-A-Porter, the 10-year-old online luxury fashion retailer founded by the British magazine editor Natalie Massenet. When it first began, people in the industry sniffed at Net-A-Porter, suggesting it was just a tatty e-commerce site masquerading as digital fashion magazine.
They’re not sniffing anymore. Net-A-Porter sold for over half a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive purchases of a consumer publisher — if that’s what it is — in many years. Net-A-Porter now employs more than 900 people (more than a vast majority of newsrooms and magazines), features products from 3,000 high-end designers and has four million visitors a month — far more than InStyle.com from Time Inc., Style.com from Condé Nast or the Harper’s Bazaar Web site.
“Brands, especially those centered around lifestyle interests or luxury, are increasingly becoming media companies,” said Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital, a digital communications and consulting firm.
Anna Wintour may still turn heads every time she’s near a runway, but frankly commercial products like Net-A-Porter are pointing the way forward not only for fashion, but for publishing as well. The mainstream media have lamented, then celebrated, the digital revolution, but the fact that creating and distributing content is getting cheaper — “Look, Ma, no trucks, no printing presses!” — has not been lost on the brands themselves.
On Saturday, Burberry live-streamed its menswear show from Milan. Consumers who tuned in could not only watch the fancy model boys come down the runway in a variety of outerwear, but also click and buy anything they coveted and have it delivered to their door in six to eight weeks.
The luxury brand LVMH has a Web site called Nowness that features all manner of daily specials. In the United States, the Gilt Groupe, a bargain hunter’s paradise for the luxury-minded, is now adding editorial elements every day and watching visitors spend more and more time there.
And it’s not just fashion: Best Buy has been watching its in-store sales shrink under pressure from the Web and has responded with On, a digital mag-a-log with editorial content and advertisements from other brands. Thrillist sends out e-mails to subscribers with a curated list of local entertainment and retail options.
One Kings Lane, an e-commerce company that sells designer home décor and furnishings, just acquired Helicopter, the hotshot design firm that helped start the well-crafted and much-missed Domino magazine, as well as doing work for mainstream publishers like The Wall Street Journal, Hachette, Time Inc. and Hearst.
Apart from its burgeoning Web site, Net-A-Porter’s iPad app takes commerce and content not only mobile, but one step further. The magazine (if that’s what it is) offers a pleasing editorial narrative in the horizontal format with a parade of models and various frocks, but when the user turns the device to portrait mode, individual items pop in a retail environment, ready to buy with the swipe of a finger. And the twin revenue streams of advertising from other brands and transactions make it a promising proposition.
Lucky, Condé Nast’s shopping magazine, neatly foresaw this future of editorial and advertising elements blending into a single reader experience, but the company did not take the last step of making it a place that people could buy from. Adam Lavelle, the chief strategy office of iCrossing, the digital marketing agency owned by Hearst, believes that those old lines are fast disappearing.
“The days when you only had someone put together a television or a magazine ad out there and then waited three months to see if it worked are over,” he said. “The old line separating church and state is not gone, but is definitely a more blurry one. And brands that are authentic, not shameless or opportunistic, have a chance to create content that people will pay attention to.”
With the acquisition of iCrossing, Hearst is working quickly to build out consumer experiences that go beyond the traditional dyad of editorial girded by advertising, in part because advertisers expect more and will go elsewhere — or do it themselves — to get it.
Editorial credibility, once the sole province of old-line publishing houses, is now being bought and paid for by the brands themselves. Mr. Langmead, the former Esquire editor, will oversee Mr. Porter, a male-oriented online retail site that will serve as a companion to Net-A-Porter.
Andrea Linett, the former creative director of Lucky, has gone on to become eBay’s fashion creative director, while Melissa Biggs Bradley, the founding editor of Town and Country Travel for Hearst, is now the chief executive at the travel site Indagare. And many journalists who were pushed aside as publishing withered are now finding that brands in search of an audience are still interested in what they do.
“For us, this is nothing new,” said Claudia Plant, editorial director of Net-A-Porter. “For 10 years, we have been giving people information they want in a compelling, entertaining format while they shop. We fuse content with commerce and fashion.”
Susan Lyne, the former chief executive of Martha Stewart Living, is now head of the Gilt Groupe. As it has added more and more editorial elements, consumers are coming not only to shop, but to browse, read and investigate, which used to be the province of magazines.
“We are not in the publishing business; we are in the editing business,” she said. “But if I were in the media business, I would be concerned because it used to be that in order to reach a certain kind of consumer, brands used to have to buy ads in relevant magazines or with a certain kind of television programming. That’s clearly not the case anymore.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com; twitter.com/carr2n
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