Mercedes Bunz

When I finally reached the office this morning, Leon Bailey Green’s post about fashion on the eConsultancy blog attacted me from my Google reader and made me think. His text about “The blurring of online fashion retail” concentrates some fact about editorial and promotional content mixing more than ever as fashion retailers publish their own magazines, have a blog or pay writers to create some content around their brands. I recently had a similar discussion with Edmund Roussel of Telegraph.co.uk as his site also goes into that direction. Now Leon wrote about the same:

“The strongest examples of blurring we have seen are; ASOS with its own print magazine, News International and Bauer Media entering the world of retail, with Brand Alley and Cocosa respectively, and Grazia which launched a collection of accessories through a range of fashion stores.”

I don’t even have to look that far. Back in Berlin where I just flew in from this morning, some of my best friends make a living of that, and we had discussed the issue already over different Sunday brunches.

Fashion shootings have been paid for a long time by product placement, and the line has been blurred for quite a while. No, you can’t blame this shift on the retailers. I remember very well the Sunday I flipped with my photographer friend Gene through ID magazine and he taught me to spot the product placements. There wasn’t one photo shooting without it. Yes, the mixing of editorial content and promotion has a not so much talked about history in journalism, too.

Here you can say we shouldn’t worry so much about fashion, as it is only the softer side of journalism. However, every morning when I get up fashion is at least partly about who I choose to be instead of being told who I am, so it is as much a personal as a political matter. Me at least, I take what it is very serious, and not only in terms of brands.

Anyway, I am very sure that the blurring of editorial content and promotion is something that will pretty soon move beyond fashion and affect journalism in general. It will happen to all editorial content, and maybe it will happen to all PR, too.

So a couple of questions woke me up as they started to talk lively across each other.

Isn’t public relations becoming smarter and smarter? Isn’t there a reason to prefer charismatic, good paid PR content to sloppily done, uninformed badly paid journalism? Mad Men, anyone? However, if you give into that, don’t you give in to the power of money streams and economy, an economy who is the new politics?

This is exactly why I would say with blurring the lines between promotion and editorial content, fashion is doing much more. Its change is a trace of a deeper transformation of society.

I was thinking about it this morning while taking the red eye morning flight back from Berlin to London, when I denied the horrible Lufthansa sandwich and bit instead in their wonderful richness of papers. The Financial Times, the German FAZ, and the International Herald Tribune, which I always appreciate most. Suddenly I it hit me like a blitz, and I knew that we needed to bring back the economical perspective that my most beloved economist Walter Eucken was focussing on: Economy needs to be discussed again as a political issue, and not as fate like we did with the actual financial crisis. We know that economy is never simply there but made; we do need so much more reporting on economical relations, so much more reporting about how political decisions shape or fail to shape economical opportunities.

I quickly wrote it down in my black small notebook, and thanks to the plane flying very calmly above the clouds the Stabilo I used nearly didn’t wobble. When I read the eConsultancy blog, I decided that the fact that superb editorial content is financed by retailers, is telling us a bigger story. It is telling us about an economical shift. It is re-formulating what alternative projects are about, and alternative projects were always badly needed by all creative industries as they live from new creations.

So here is the thing. Up till now, independent production always had one problem. It couldn’t became successful without tearing itself apart asking: Is this a sell out? And are we being bought? A lot of time it was. Sometimes it was just tearing itself apart.

However, now I am not sure anymore if this is still the right question. Maybe the problem of today’s projects isn’t about being sold out. What if the question that has to be asked today is different? What if we have to ask: How can we afford to realise that? How can we make it happen? And if we make it happen, is the line not blurred in a wonderful way?

To be continued…

PS: If you want an example what doesn’t work out, have a look here. Google shows how the lines are not blurred but stabbing each other as fashion gets killed by a horrible presentation/appropriation.