Having spent a good part of my career developing creative strategies for retailers, I am always in awe of how Old Navy continues to reinvent a boring, staid marketing category. They aren't afraid to take risks, maintain an integrated brand personality and have genius promotions. Today's retail promotion and activation campaign take that creativity to new levels. I love the supermodelquins for a couple of reasons.
1. I've never seen it done before. They aren't normal, boring mannequins. They seem like the type of mannequins that you'd see in those old nuclear testing videos that were inside of the houses when the government was testing the A-bomb in Nevada. They seem like their normal models, just calcified.
2. No model fees. With these mannequins there are no model fees, royalties or usage fees. In this economy, this is a brilliant way to cut costs.
3. They create a magazine-type format rather than just a boring preprint. Hold this preprint up to a Sears or Kohls preprint and the delta in creativity will astonish you. They also created a multimedia video of the mannequins in an in-store environment doing crazy things. Good, but not great.
Couple of thoughts that could make this campaign even better.
1. Allow kids to share not just the entire site, but each piece of clothing on the promotional website. Tweens, especially girls, seek their friends' approval and being able to post this to their social profile or SMS a jpeg would go a long way in helping to move the product. Also, it can give the brand some sense of the hottest products so when merchandising future issues of the preprint, they can allocate the space to the hottest product.
2. Create Supermodelquin avatars and take beyond the Old Navy properties - the video is a valiant attempt at creating a fun, engaging video. I imagine that the creative team could think of a million viral ways to show these mannequins that would create a momentum effect in sharing the videos around the social web.
3. Allow people to customize their supermodelquins creating an engagement model - whether dragging and dropping clothes onto mannequins of their choice, uploading their face onto a mannequin or any other personalization feature. Then, allow them to share it with the world.
Great job, Old Navy. Your creative today has activated my wife to visit your store for your one-day sale, today. However, her exact words were "Old Navy is going to be a zoo, today."
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