A Digital Makeover for the Modeling Business

What Ford is selling--via videos featuring models demonstrating the perfect hair curl or selecting the right top for black jeans or exfoliating lips--is expertise. People want to be more attractive and stylish, and though they can get tips from magazines and television shows, the Ford videos have a more candid, friends-sharing-secrets feel that, somewhat paradoxically, lends authority. "This is stuff our models know about," says Liz Edelstein, a video talent coordinator at the agency. "They can explain why one top works and another doesn't." What's more, the videos cost as little as $200 to produce, which means that Ford can churn out one or two a day. Viewers range from preteens to women in their 40s, thanks partly to partnerships with MySpace and iVillage, respectively.

Of course, creating popular videos is far from the hardest part of the equation. "The real challenge," says YouTube's Hoffner, "is how do you create a sustainable business around it?" Fortunately for Ford, the people who watch its videos also tend to spend like crazy on clothes and cosmetics. And a lot of that spending is moving online. Marketing consultancy Forrester Research (NASDAQ:FORR) calculates that beauty product sales on the Web jumped 22 percent in 2006 and expects them to post another 25 percent increase in 2007.

It's no secret that marketers lust after opportunities to integrate advertising with entertainment. But most content producers wisely fear viewer ire when it comes to adulterating their efforts with bought themes. It would be hard to take Dr. Phil seriously if he kept pushing Verizon phones on his hapless guests. But Ford is relatively free to peddle the themes of its videos to sponsors. Who's going to object? If you enjoy watching models, you're not going to mind if they fuss over Armani or Dior.

That line of thinking isn't lost on retailers like Express's Pamela Seidman. Her office is in the same building as Ford Models, and nearly every Thursday she ends up stuffed on the elevator with a crowd of young women going in and out of Ford's weekly open casting call. "I kept thinking that these women should be shopping at our store across the street," Seidman says. "And I knew the way to reach them was online." Last spring, she set up a meeting with Caplan and Grossbach to explore ways for Express to integrate a planned campaign for jeans with Ford videos. "People don't pay as much attention to a brand when it's the brand doing the talking," Seidman says. "What people listen to are neutral influencers, and models are perfect for that."

Ford agreed to make four videos about jeans; in one, two models happen to mention that they picked up their pants at Express. On some sites, viewers were offered the chance to win a gig as a stylist at a photo shoot--and a shopping excursion at Express. Also included: a $20 coupon that brought in $500,000 in register sales in one month, the bulk of the sum from people who had never before shopped at Express.

Online fashion purveyor Bluefly paid Ford to create a series of videos of models rummaging through its offerings and singing the praises of the merchandise while offering various tips on style. On some sites, viewers who liked what they saw in the video were able to click on a button to be whisked straight to Bluefly to start shopping. Jackie Stewart's video about green fashion, meanwhile, was sponsored by the Weather Channel, which is seeking to align its brand with environmental themes online. Nestlé paid Ford to show its Poland Spring water being handed out to aspiring models, a video that was viewed more than 132,000 times.

Grossbach won't say how much Ford charges sponsors, but he claims that the video business is already solidly in the black. In addition to integrating video content with marketing themes, Ford also offers marketers a chance to get its messages into e-mails sent under the Ford banner to hundreds of thousands of wannabe models in the agency's database. That's an appealing prospect for Jonathan Sackett, who heads digital marketing for advertising agency Arnold Worldwide. "Third-party advocacy is always going to deliver a stronger message than anything an Armani can do itself," Sackett says.

At the same time, of course, Ford has to tread carefully. Even though fans may be troubled not a whit to see their fashion idols chattily touting various brands, trust and interest will erode the instant they sense that models are simply shills for products. In other words, once the videos start to feel like commercials, the game is over. Ford executives are keenly aware of this danger. The topics and settings of the videos are negotiable, but the models' comments and actions are not. "This isn't advertising; it's not product placement," Grossbach says. "It's organic product integration. Bluefly didn't tell our models what to say. And if they had tried to, we'd have told them to go shoot a commercial."

Contributing editor David H. Freedman wrote about serial CEO Bob Cramer for Inc.'s January 2008 issue.