When it rains, it pours is as the saying goes. At almost any point in any large fashion magazine, you could find huge ads and many of them. For example in the 2007 September issue of vogue, that weighed in at an astounding 4 pounds, 9 ounces, out of the 840 pages in the magazine, 727 of them were ads. Vogue said that that number dropped by 36% to only a mere 429 pages. So why the steep decline? Well it is a culmination of a few things, but mostly just the three elephants in the room; free marketing, cheap marketing and the economic downturn. With all the money lost in the stock market and everything else, the big fashion companies that spend a ton of money on those big fancy ads we all love, have either been cutting back or cutting out.
So now, without those big extensive ads, what are these huge companies doing to compensate? They, like many others, are utilizing the full capability of social networking sites like twitter, youtube, facebook, mixx, etc. They are using the free ad space that is there by creating fan pages blogs, etc and buying up digital ad space. Almost any large website you go on you will see the banner ads down the side and across the top. “These are advertisers where luxury and perfection and style is first and foremost. The Web experience was pretty cluttered. Now that there are bigger screens on desks, hi-def, beautiful video in real time, iPhone apps that look beautiful, the aesthetics have gotten to a place they are interested in,” says Drew Schutte, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for Condé Nast Digital, which is trying to boost the number of ad packages it sells that include both print ads and digital ads. Is this the future for ads in regards to fashion, or ads in general. With the decline in print, and the incline in digital media outlets, it seems it may be so.
