Luxury Institute News

Once-Hefty September Editions Lose Ads as Apparel Marketers Cut Back and Experiment More Online

By Emily Steel
August 17, 2009 WSJ.com

“They’ve been stuck in the Victorian Age, and the Industrial Age, for some time. Times were good for the last two years, and the marketers were fighting the need to go online,” says Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a New York consumer-research firm. “Now, it’s an absolute necessity.”

Below are some excerps from a WSJ.com article from which the above quote resides:

Fashion magazines’ September issues are usually nice and fat, bursting with new looks for cold weather. This year, some are almost as skinny as the models inside.

Behind the relatively svelte issues are newly frugal fashion advertisers, slashing their budgets in the recession and experimenting with putting more ad dollars to use on the Web.

High-end fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Emporio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada are still buying ads in the glossy pages of Condé Nast’s Vogue and W, Hachette Filipacchi’s Elle, Time Warner’s InStyle and Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar. But most of the September issues, which started showing up on newsstands last week, are almost a third slimmer than last year’s batch.

Data from WPP’s ad tracking firm TNS Media Intelligence show a significant uptick in the ad spending that fashion marketers are devoting to the Web. Louis Vuitton North America more than doubled its digital ad spending in 2008 to $286,000, from $107,000 in 2007, TNS reports. Diane von Furstenberg boosted its Web spending from nothing to $43,000 last year.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125046605103135399.html?mg=com-wsj