A Digital Makeover for the Modeling Business

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His first move was to tweak the core business: booking jobs for 2,200 models, hairstylists, makeup artists, photographers, and other talent, a business that comprises some 65,000 transactions a year in 14 offices around the world. He moved the New York headquarters from its legendary two-floor digs in SoHo to a new headquarters uptown, where the 90 bookers would be closer to the media and fashion action. A new state-of-the-art booking system put a wide range of data at bookers' fingertips.

But Caplan knew he hadn't been brought to Ford to tinker with the booking business. "I had another mountain to climb," he says. Could Ford Models profitably enter the new-media world? To help spearhead that effort, Caplan tapped Mitch Grossbach, who had been an executive at a customer relationship management software company called Interface Software, to head a new digital division. What would it mean for a modeling agency to go digital? Grossbach had some ideas. "If you could take the static world of photos and catalogs and bring it to life by making it dynamic and interactive, you'd have a whole new business," he says. That meant video, of course, though it wasn't immediately clear what Ford was supposed to make videos of or how to make them pay off for the business.

One obvious move was to start taping "live casting" sessions, in which models audition for jobs by responding to a director's instructions while being photographed. You might think that still photographs themselves would do the trick, but in fact directors put huge stock in how a model behaves. "Personality is everything with a model," says Paulette Ellison, a manager in the model-booking side of Ford's business. "Sure, looks are important, but you'll be spending 10 hours with the model on the set, so you want to know what they're like." Now, online casting videos are an important element in each Ford model's portfolio.

While casting videos were a nice tweak, it wouldn't move the needle much for the business. Caplan and Grossbach were after something that would build the Ford brand online. Unfortunately, fashion isn't easily webified. Exquisitely shot high glamour doesn't jump smoothly from the pages of glossy magazines to the relatively low-resolution and low-brow Internet, with its schlock dancing-cartoon-character banner ads.

Meanwhile, the way in which the modeling business had leaped to television was, to Caplan, less an inspiration than a cautionary tale. In late 2005, Jordan Hoffner, at that time an executive at NBC Universal, tried to persuade Caplan to collaborate on a television show featuring Ford models. Shows like Bravo's Project Runway and TLC's What Not to Wear were big hits. But the talks went nowhere. Part of the problem was that Caplan was appalled at the general tenor of fashion reality shows. "It's train-wreck television," he says, noting that the shows tend to emphasize competition, conflict, backstabbing, criticism, and snotty behavior--not qualities that he was eager to associate with the Ford brand. What's more, if Ford Models was to be involved in any sort of media production, Caplan wanted the agency to retain ownership. And that doesn't happen on TV.

In the fall of 2006, Hoffner and Caplan met again. But this time Hoffner was an executive at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). He'd joined a month before its acquisition of YouTube and was serving as the video-sharing site's head of content partnerships. And Caplan had an idea to bounce off him: What if Ford began supplying short videos featuring models in informal settings demonstrating beauty and shopping tips? That sounded fine to Hoffner, who assured him YouTube could help promote the videos on its homepage and elsewhere.

What Caplan and Grossbach envisioned were videos that showed what models are really like when they aren't posing at shoots or on the runway. If that doesn't sound immediately compelling, it probably would if you worked a shift in Ford's mailroom. "Thousands of people apply to be models every single day--and that's without any advertising," says Grossbach. Indeed, Seventeen magazine, the fashion bible for the teen crowd with more than 13 million readers, conducted an online survey in May and found that 85 percent of its readers dream of being models.

The way Caplan saw it, online exposure and a chance to build a bit of a fan base would be great for some of Ford's up-and-coming talent, in that it might lead to more work. And, of course, Ford would own the clips. But there was something else. "People look at what our models wear, what music they listen to, and want to follow," says Grossbach. "How many brands can act as influencers that way? Our business is built around some of the most attractive people on the planet. We're global authorities on fashion, trends, and style. That's a pretty interesting set of assets to work with, wouldn't you say?"

The first videos were shot in Ford's offices. But since early 2007, the agency has been using professional facilities, such as Neo Studios in New York's NoHo neighborhood. It's a modest space, the size of a large living room, stocked with backdrops and fashion props like dress racks and plenty of lights. Ford's videos aren't intended to blend in with the typical YouTube fare--which Caplan characterizes as "two guys driving a bike into a wall." They're well lighted, with crisp editing and often a slick soundtrack. Still, the overall feeling is friendly, informal. "It's just me, trying on a dress," says Alejandra Cata, a model who appears in several popular videos, some of which have been viewed upward of 600,000 times. "I didn't think it would get that kind of response," she says.

The models are attractive, of course, but it's not about ogling good-looking people. (Which isn't to say there isn't a certain amount of ogling going on, as is apparent from some of the comments on videos involving on-camera clothing changes or bikinis.) But any overlap with the Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue crowd is unintentional. Why would Ford want to put out soft porn? It isn't selling lingerie or subscriptions.

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David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.