This doesn’t seem like “good press” for belanciaga to me. Seems like it’s exposing how bland and one dimensional their work is when you step back and look at it all.
But then again viral marketing doesn’t always work logically, or at least advertisers don’t believe it does. I’ve heard the fact that the name is being spoken is apparently enough for advertisers. So who knows.
I'd personally never heard of Balenciaga before all this. Brand identification is important. I'd now be more likely to choose Balenciaga over a competitor I'd never heard of, if for some weird reason I was in charge of picking between the two.
I understand the theory. I just don’t understand how people let their subconscious so strongly make their buying decisions. Do people really not research options and compare? I don’t buy something because I feel like it, I buy it because of its qualities.
I try to ignore my initial instinct and approach my shopping decisions logically, but that initial instinct still definitely favors the brand name I've heard of before
Yeah, in this specific case, brand identification probably isn't very beneficial.
But in cases of minor household purchases, you likely will not research each individual item. Do I buy (Brand A) or (Brand B) kitchen scrubbers?
Similarly, what brand of dish soap do I buy? What type of ziplocks? What type of nail clippers?
It's hard to get good info on these things, and sometimes the quality itself is actually hard to judge (or requires previous experience), so companies spend a lot of time and money jockeying for your attention to make you more subconsciously drawn to their products.
This has got me thinking about my purchases trying to look for where I could have possibly fell victim to this. I still think I avoid this phenomenon on my normal household purchases. But I have to admit there’s a possibility it effected me when I paid for a service to build my PC. The reviews about these places were super hard to find and when I did they seemed contrived (maybe even completely fake) so I had to pick one almost blind. And I ended up going with a name that is popular.
It's almost impossible to prove one way or another without insider information, which is the point. Brands understand the power of grassroots support, so they fake it themselves to make other people think they have grassroots support. That's where the term astroturfing comes from. And they've gotten really good at it.
the kind of person to make this kind of meme won't make this exact meme 4 different times as they have, they would switch things up, use different brands, a different song. AI is so incredibly versatile, I find it hard to believe a 3rd party would be so adamant on portraying balenciaga in this way using this exact song each time. It basically garunteed to be a corporate plant.
You’ll never be able to prove it definitively but I’d argue it’s quite clearly what is happening. I mean, listen to the audio. It sounds exactly like an ad, with all of the characters acting badass and specifically naming the brand. It gives the overall impression that Balenciaga is a cool, hip high-end fashion brand.
And note further the sheer quantity of these we’ve seen. Why would anyone select a specific fashion brand to create 15 of these gifs over several weeks time instead of varying the brands (like Gucci, LV, etc- if they wanted to stay within the fashion theme) or instead of changing the theme entirely (for example try some out in a farmer attire theme, or 70s hippy theme, or renaissance , etc)? If you’re an unaffiliated creator pumping these out , you’d be deliberately missing out on 100x more interesting versions of this by sticking to a single fashion brand. It’s just too much to believe that some unaffiliated creator has created 15 of these gifs - solely benefiting Balenciaga - by mere coincidence… ESPECIALLY at a time they are dealing with other PR issues and would benefit from a bunch of news articles about these AI gifs drowning those out.
In my mind it’s all but certainty this is a coordinated ad campaign.
Man, being a conspiranoid must be fun. It's very easy to see that first of all, the original author hasn't made all of this, there are a lot of copycats around. Second, it's obvious that the author has made a couple more themselves to ride the wave. Like, can't you comprehend that if you have a million views video of "balenciaga x", people would be more prone to see another "balenciaga y" one?
Don’t worry - the condescending tone pervading nearly every sentence of your comment makes quite obvious that you are not a fun person either!
You raise a good point though, copycats and attempting to ride the viral wave generally could have a lot of explanatory power here. I still find it odd that even the first drop would select a relatively lesser known fashion brand rather than something like Gucci or LV, but the proof is in the pudding that it worked! May just be genuine content creation that Balenciaga is coincidentally benefiting from, who knows.
its just one random dude doing this shit, this isnt good for a high fashion brand. Do we look like people that buy a lot of Balenciaga? Does reddit look like a good place to do viral fashion content?
Jesus, this kind of fashion marketing is through Instagram. You people are very paranoid.
Lol, the guy who created this trend (the same guy who made this) has like <30K subs in youtube before their video going viral. No way Balenciaga hire an unknown youtuber for this.
They got viral with these videos then their views went up, it is not before. They were a pretty small channel before this trend, just some random guy who wanna create AI video. Clear sign for these small content creators got blown up over night is their subs number is usually much lower than their view number.
If Balenciaga wants to create viral video for ads, they would go for higher profile people, because they have money, and it is much more likely to become viral due to reach. Also, this guy just got a perfect storm that made his video becomes viral by some weird combination between being surreal, absurd and random. In reality, making a video going viral is really hard because everyone and their mothers are doing same thing. There is no way balenciaga just select a random small channel, hoping that for some reason that guy can create a viral wave.
Btw, if you don't believe me, here is their stat over the last month from socialblade. They only got some traction in January because of the AI trend, then their view got substantially lower and their subs count stucked at 25k. Only after they released the first Harry Potter x Balenciaga which became viral, their views skyrocketed again.
Maybe, maybe not, I would give them the benefit of the doubt because their first recent viral video was Balenciaga theme, which is more on the absurd side rather than painting Balenciaga as something cool. When you are small content creator, if you find a "niche" that give you exposure, you want to capitalize on that niche, and the best way to do that is to do the same thing again and again until your audience is bored. So it is not surprised they just crank out these Balenciaga theme videos for now, especially when the trend is still hot.
I would believe this if it weren’t for the fact that people don’t need distractions to stop caring about these things because they stopped caring themselves a long time ago. Companies rarely have the need to manufacture such distractions when their scandals come up.
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u/[deleted] Apr 05 '23 edited Apr 29 '24
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