Crony marketing and French luxury
with a side of virtual try-on
I have seen so many “learnings” posts and recaps from Cannes I am afraid that any posts about it are turning into a… counter signal? How many people who weren’t there… truly care about the insights specific to the show? You hear this with Coachella, but people still consume the content because it’s timely, there’s drama, people are hot and wearing insane outfits and there’s an element of lifestyle and fame. But Cannes Lions… Is perhaps too niche for the amount of posts about it this year.
I debated not writing about it, but decided instead to focus less on the show and more on the value. To start, I’ll talk about it deeper when we have the edited videos back, but the house I hosted with Darkroom was a huge success.
10 creators living under one roof, packed panels on real modern marketing issues (how organic and paid are becoming closer together, how to build a marketing org chart in the AI era), 500 people in and out of our CPG Garden on Tuesday.
This year my biggest goal as a creator was more community, particularly IRL and after our tour earlier this year and now Cannes, I’m feeling great about it. LA, we’ve got something brewing for you this fall next, and if any of you are in South Korea, I’m considering a meetup there as well, get in touch!
In this week’s HYPER we touch on
my passionate dissertation any big company and agency readers to move away from what I’ll call “crony marketing” that old Cannes represents and embrace quantifiable modern practices that tie your marketing more directly to dollars, emails and internet resonance
agentic storefronts and the latest rollout from our friends at Swap
the art direction of French luxury
Let’s begin.
Virtual Try On & Agentic Storefronts
This segment is in partnership with Swap
So last week we saw one of the most interesting ecom launches I can remember.
WILLY CHAVARRIA and Adidas dropped their World Cup collection exclusively on an agentic storefront (powered by Swap)… and it 2x’d their biggest ecomm sales day ever on launch.
I watched my friend Ashwinn virtually try on the clothes via the site, and immediately felt like the future was here. Shoppers land and an agent guides them through discovery, fit, virtual try-on, and checkout in one flow. This is the drop: https://www.swap-commerce.com/willy-chavarria-agentic-storefront
I love talking about Swap Storefront because its an AI win that CMO’s and marketing leaders can present to leadership with real data. Across the 20+ brands implementing on-platform Swap is tracking: 2x conversion rates, 3x time on site, 20% fewer returns.
For virtual try-on specifically: 58% of sessions end in add-to-cart, with 20% converting to purchase. LFG.
If you’re running a brand and want to understand what’s possible: swap-commerce.com/book-a-demo
Crony marketing
There is a certain type of marketing leader, and team that really resists quantification, especially in big legacy brands.
They understand that as long as they do some things, there’s some degree of marketing effort, everything’s just gonna… kinda work. They either focus on easily achievable metrics that don’t really matter that are easy to put on a slide, or the adjustments of the tactics, like an expanded media by in the Southeast.
They’ve resisted the era we’re in now where you can really stack meta, google, youtube, tiktok, snap, applovin, connected TV plus creator, plus events, plus email, geo-based retargetting, and basically build a quantifiable, scalable machine that’s ultra effective but… hard.
And Cannes in particular is always a good reminder to me, of why some are so resistant to change.
First the agencies. A lot of agencies get inventory from media partners they are responsible for packaging and selling to their clients there’s deals cut around this and a lot of that inventory sucks, it drives terrible result comparative to above, but theres a huge economy around providing it.
Then multiply that by the illusion of familiarity, gets ads on websites or publications people know wasn’t a bad idea in the past. But now, the state of banner ads, interstitials, AI traffic being counted as real, and buying anything from traditional media online becomes a terrible buy.
And then of course, the cronyism something like Cannes embodies: buy enough inventory you get VIP to the concert, you’re on the yacht, the dinners continue, of course we’ll work that in the media budget, this is sales 101.
But there’s a divide now, the future is squarely here and it plays out in the South of France.
I hosted a panel with Manychat, WisprFlow and Dara Denney on how organic and paid media work hand in hand and everyone was adamant to the crowd watching to maintain 30% or MORE whitelisted ads from creators and other accounts for scaling efficacy.
I talking on a panel with McDonalds and Unilever (two of the savviest big brand powerhouses when it comes to modern marketing) where they were talking about the power of local, storytelling driven initiatives by region, that then scale up when they acquire organic attention.
This is for software, ecommerce, services. If you’re on the retargetting yacht getting sold a bill of goods, and the future is happening right next to you, it gets awkward.
And what happens is, they get exposed. Darkroom, who hosted our house, thrives on this. Every month more and more massive brands around the globe go “our old agency is not giving us modern methods and quantifiable analytics” and Darkroom, and closes them. It is a shifting of resources from the old guard to the new guard that can actually speak their language versus just pitching the “we connect brands and creators” offer that I heard 1000 times.
But right now the biggest opportunity for anyone in this space is the comms gap with elder marketing leadership brand side and agency side. I was at a TikTok party where an agency owner admitted I was the first creator they ever talked to IRL.
I met an agency with Youtube as a client who I was their first Youtube they talked to. These are not exaggerations, in fact these people weren’t even ashamed of it, they just exist at a different place on the adoption curve and their clients have done… fine without needing to embrace the tactics disruptors are using to break out.
We are existing in parallel world, and someone or something needs to brings them together.
And my tone on this in writing, content and in person has always been a little inflammatory. I am, frankly, disgusted when brands waste money and at how antiquated many of these methods are, I have made plenty of jokes over time at Havas and Saatchis expense, chastised VP friends for the cursed Puck or Verge media buy they may as well have lit on fire.
But while that was the right tone to position and tell the youth and entrepreneurs what to embrace, its not what gets the old media and agency world to successfully survive the shift, and education is ultimately my goal here, to be on the leading edge of marketing tactics for everyone, to give real playbooks for change.
Determine your performance to brand marketing split in budget and time/team allocation, and find alignment on that with leadership and the team itself
Not every brand can be completely performance dedicated, nor should they be. Is that 90/10 for a lean operating software startup? 50/50 for a brand in mass retail spending tens of millions a month and lost in the chaos theory of marketing?
Rally all your services or internal work around North Star metrics that matter
CAC: customer acquisition cost (measured comparatively to lifetime customer value)
CPL: Cost to get an email or qualified lead (an excellent metric to immediately improve marketing efficacy is driving campaigns to signups and lead magnets and assigning them a value. I’ll write about an incredible one of these Motion did soon)
Social intent (saves and shares of influencer, creator and organic content
Influencer EMV - not perfect but a better goal than impressions or views on other networks
Map out acquisition channel priorities, who is responsible for them, with direct stakeholders for each metric on each platform
Work back from those metrics to the actions, from outreach, to briefing, to media buying, to approval bottlenecks to make SOPs with as little resistance to action as possible for team members to follow
Set expectations as to the speed and volume of rollout and measurement (I like to run this on a Daily, Weekly, Monthly priority/metric framework of what is worth measuring and reporting on which of those cadences)
Anyone or any agency that doesn’t want to be held accountable in this manner, you need to move on from, this is the reality
If you remember anything from any of my newsletters, it should be the push to live and die by quantified modern marketing tactics versus what is easy, lives off relationships or incentives, or is in everyones comfort zone. The lines are clear.
The Art Direction of French Luxury
Ending on a lighter note entering the weekend, my latest Youtube details the art direction tactics of Jacquemus, and how brands use the aesthetics of luxury to build their resonance.
Until next week,
Oren