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Allsaints Blonde Content Marketing

Why AllSaints shuns traditional ad campaigns in favour of content creation

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By Natalie Mortimer | N/A

December 19, 2014 | 4 min read

Since the birth of AllSaints’ creative film unit, in conjunction with Dazed last year, the fashion retailer has aped creative agencies and begun collaborating with a swathe of artists from the music and film world. This has seen it create videos and documentaries as it turns up the heat on its content-led marketing strategy.

Despite its most recent foray into the film world, the brand has long aimed to blend music and fashion into a heady mix of disruptive content creation, brushing off traditional marketing campaigns to better communicate its brand values.

Speaking to The Drum creative director at AllSaints, Wil Beedle, said the traditional ad model “isn’t compatible” with the retailer’s versatility and nimbleness.

“A campaign in formal terms is not necessarily brand compatible,” he revealed. “We actually contribute in channel specific means, all over the world, globally communicating our own attitude and point of view across several cultures and channels.

“We have more than one million people engaging with the brand every week so the formality and the rigid structure of a quarterly campaign doesn’t necessarily connect to the way that we want to express ourselves. We’re more versatile than that, we’re creating daily, we’re operating and functioning daily and we believe in this ongoing evolving cycle of civilisation that allows us to explore models of communications that connect to the brand.”

Those projects include The Biker Project, a short film created to highlight the design and craftsmanship of AllSaints’ leather jackets, and the brand’s most recent music video collaboration with New York-based band Blonde Redhead’s for their latest single, Dripping, which promotes the AllSaints Christmas clothing collection.

Plans are in the works to serialise the Studio’s Below the Knee series, which delves into the New York dominatrix scene and features the brand’s Italian leather collection.

“We have a number of these different platforms and channels with which to communicate and we like to weave those together in an expedient nimble way to communicate brand,” added Beedle.

The aim for the film and music marketing strategy, said Beedle, is to “engage and disrupt” in what he called a “crowded environment of contemporary content creation”.

Going forward AllSaints will continue to marry different creative expressions together so that it can, “continue to engage, delight and disrupt consumer expectations and try and find new things, react at pace and evolve to create new boundaries”.

The London-born brand has set its sights on moving into different countries – it currently operates in the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, US, Canada, Russia and South Korea – and one of the biggest challenges, revealed Beedle, is how AllSaints can evolve its use of language as it expands through Asian territories.

More serialised projects are planned for 2015, which Beedle would not be pushed on, but he did hint that the brand will begin to forge a strong global voice and “culturally vibrant dialogue” between the different activities in the worldwide cities in which AllSaints operates.

Those series will continue in the same vein of recent work which has been focussed on exploring new ways of working within the music industry, away from AllSaints’ East London roots, which has become a popular focus for many brands since the explosion of the hipster scene.

“When we started doing the basement session many years ago, it was somewhat unique to document the vibrant neighbourhood that we inhabit here in East London,” he said.

“Documenting the bands passing through the epicentre of the global scene was somewhat a rarity, but now it’s a much more familiar platform for bands to communicate. We wanted to find a way to leverage our own internal creative agency, our skill set and independent thinking on to the music/fashion axis and try and create a more relevant model for now.”

Beedle added that producing a content-lead strategy with artists is hugely beneficial for the brand and much more important than “bland partnerships”.

Allsaints Blonde Content Marketing

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