Just ahead of New York Fashion Week this fall, YouTube launched a new centralized hub for fashion and beauty content on the platform. /Fashion allows users to find videos from fashion and beauty brands, as well as creators.
During Fashion Week, /Fashion housed livestreams of runway shows along with videos from brands, publishers, and creators. YouTube’s director of beauty and fashion, Derek Blasberg, envisions three types of potential partners for the new channel: fashion and beauty brands, professionals – like models and makeup artists; and publishers.
Influencers are no strangers to the fashion space and continue to play a vital role in moving product in this industry. Retailers like Nordstrom and Revolve have driven a ton of sales by partnering with influencers like Arielle Charnas, Aimee Song, and Julia Engel on exclusive collections. Most recently Amazon joined the movement with The Drop, which launched in May – an influencer-led initiative offering shoppers limited-edition, “street style-inspired” collections from their favorite social media stars.
YouTube’s hope for /Fashion is that fashion brands will start to work with more influencers to create compelling original content. The platform is bringing together some of its most popular creators to work brands, joining the fashion industry with some of YouTube’s most popular personalities. Earlier this year, Louis Vuitton teamed up with YouTube star Emma Chamberlain to promote its Cruise fashion show and in June the brand worked with the Dolan Twins to support its men’s line. Both videos garnered millions of views and quickly hit the trending page on YouTube – proving that audiences are engaging in a real way with branded content. Influencers continue to lend an unfiltered authenticity to brands who often struggle to connect in an accessible way with audiences.
We’ve seen this content-mining approach work first hand. For our client, Gliss, we recruited two beauty influencers for a yearlong ambassador program including a national ad campaign featuring these two ladies. During the commercial shoot, we rolled cameras behind the scenes to give Gliss fans and the influencers’ followers a sneak peek of the shoot and also took advantage of the time on set to produce even more professional assets for the brand to use in the year ahead on their digital properties and social channels. Not only did we create these amazing assets for Gliss, but we were also able to track individual post performance, monitor sales and attribution data, and identify which influencers made the biggest impact for the brand all in our innovative tracking platform.
More and more brands are starting to understand the importance and value of original content and tapping into creators to help them authentically reach their target audience and tell their brand story. It’s more important than ever for brands to focus on the ROI of their influencer efforts and feel confident that their strategy is paying off.