My 14 year old thinks Sears is cool. So does my 82 year old father. Go figure.
Sears launched a major marketing initiative this summer called Arrival Lounge to highlight to it’s younger target audience that you shouldn’t just go back to school – you should ‘arrive’ back to school- suitably attired in Sears back-to-school fashions. Sears hired Disney Channel celebrity Selina Gomez to lead the marketing program which is centered around it’s arrivelounge.com website. The site includes music, celebrities, dancing, backstage passes, coupons, behind-the-scenes features, air-band contests and high quality video production. Sears has done all of the requisite cross-promotions with social media sites like YouTube and Facebook and has also developed tie-in programs with MTV. The program has been a huge success for the company.
What makes this campaign particularly interesting is the company’s use of web-based video. Sears has comfortably broken a couple of web-video barriers (launching music on the site without asking and also playing full screen – albeit lower res - video) and seem to be employing a video first and ‘text as support’ approach which until now has been the other way around. Video has traditionally been used as support for the text that appears on a website.
While it certainly makes sense that retail establishments targeting younger demographics would lead the integration of video marketing into websites this isn’t the beginning of the end, it’s the simply the end of the beginning (it made more sense when Churchill said it…). What we are seeing with sites like this is a glimpse beyond the ‘text web’ – the integration of broadcast media and rich media programming into what until now has been a static content delivery environment. Sears isn’t the first company to take this approach but given their history and positioning in the marketplace it is a significant departure from it’s traditional marketing activities.
The short term consequence will be a surge in rich media web video production – a lot of it quite awful (remember the first websites) and unfortunately will favor those with traditionally larger marketing budgets. That said, the clever use of social media channels could turn out to be the great equalizer between large and smaller companies.
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