Online fashion retailer The Iconic has turned away from TV, saying the medium did not provide the measurable insights the business needed.
According to Nielsen, The Iconic spent $2 million on advertising over the past 12 months, investing around 50% of that on metro TV.
Interestingly, Missguided.com, another online fashion site targeting young women, is currently running ads during Nine's The Voice.
The Iconic will divert that spend elsewhere, with a significant chunk likely to go to digital. The brand recently launched its first Instagram campaign, with MD and co-founder Adam Jacobs telling AdNews the Facebook-owned photo site was a better fit for the brand.
“We've stopped doing TV altogether in Australia – it's not something we think you get a return on investment on, at least in our target market, for our brand.
“From a brand marketing perspective, [working with Instagram] has reinforced our hypothesis that traditional media isn't where our consumers are anymore, and there was a bigger opportunity to engage with them in more emerging digital platforms,” he says.
The brand used Instagram to roll out its recent autumn-winter campaign, shot on Tasmania's Cradle Mountain, and overall the business saw a 23% uplift in conversions from people exposed to the campaign, as well as a 13% uplift in ad recall.
“It's great to have those numbers,” Jacobs says. “When you're running TV as a comparison, it's really hard to know how it performed. We've tried several different methodologies for tracking our advertising spend in TV and other above-the-line channels, and you can get a sense for it, but you can't really have an accurate picture.”
While Jacobs wouldn't be led on what The Iconic's marketing mix now looked like minus TV, he pointed to the fact that the brand's channel plan is something that the business looks at every six months.
“We're in a space that's evolving so quickly. How you reach your audience a year ago is completely different to how you reach your audience today, so there's a number of things we're always looking at within the mix.”
Facebook last week announced a large data partnership with Quantium, Acxiom and Experian, which sees the social behemoth now able to marry its data with that of some of the biggest data providers in the country. The deal is something The Iconic will look to take advantage of.
“Relevancy is something that we really care about, in terms of speaking with relevant content for a relevant audience,” says Jacobs, “And having access to that kind of data is only going to increase our capability to be relevant to our audience, so it’s something we’re really excited about.”
A version of this story appeared in the latest issue of AdNews magazine (24 July). You can get it right now in either print or on your iPad by clicking right here.
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