Victoria's Secret BEST MARKETING EVENT

Brandweek, June 28, 1999 by Susan Kuchinskas

Calling the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show Webcast a marketing event is putting it mildly. The February 3 screening took on a life of its own and made pop-culture history. The 1.5 million people who watched women's bodies jerkily moving inside the two-inch square video window proved that the human imagination will always he more powerful than technology.

The event's interplay of media was as smooth as silk. Columbus, Ohio-based Resource Marketing let fall a campaign that included TV spots, Web banners and pop-up interstitials at both www.victoriassecret.com and parent company Intimate Brands' investor-relations site. (The company's Class A stock spiked 10 percent the day of the Webcast.) Full-page print ads featuring models in underwear slunk into daily and weekly publications, and a curtain-raiser Web page featuring Tyra Banks reaped 400,000 registrations for the event. Victoria's Secret itself did its usual PR blitz--one model even rang the bell for the opening of the New York Stock Exchange the day of the show.

The ultimate goal was to drive traffic to the site, an e-commerce venture that launched late last year. Was the Webcast even necessary? The answer is probably not--the single Super Bowl commercial trumpeting the site sent half a billion people there the following week.

Below are the perspectives of several key players in the making of a Web phenomenon--and winner of IQ's Best Marketing Event award.

Edward G. Razek, President

Intimate Brands

"There was no question in our minds that we were going to get more people to log on to our show than had ever logged on to anything before.

"We looked for an [advertising] venue that would reach the most people. One hundred twenty-five million people watch the game, and a third of them are women. Interestingly, within 30 minutes of our commercial being broadcast in the first quarter of the Super Bowl, a million people had left their televisions and logged on to our Web site. I believe that makes it the biggest collective behavioral shift in the history of mass communications.

"We got criticism for the quality of the broadcast, but that was the state of the art. Of course, we melted the computers--we knew we would."

Nancy Kramer, President

Resource Marketing

"We spent a tremendous amount of time getting to know the brand as we were working on the site. One of the things we learned was that people are dying to know more about the models they use.

"The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in New York City is just incredibly hot--you simply cannot get a ticket. We knew that there was so much demand, such a frenzy, that it would be something that a lot of their customers would be interested in watching even though the technology is not completely there."

Tim Sanders, National Accounts Manager

"Victoria's Secret asked us, 'Do you think if we put [the fashion show] on the Internet, anybody would come?' I told them, 'If you do the deal with us and let us broadcast it, it will be the biggest event in the history of the Internet.'

broadcast.com

"[It] was a good way to get into the news, but it's a wonderful way to create an electronic database of customers.

"We [expected] 100,000 profiles from the curtain-raiser. They got four times that many. People will reward you with information for good content."

Visitors to site in week following first TV spot: 500 million

Webcast viewers: 1.5 million

Orders: Originated from 90 countries

Press: Enough clippings to fill a four-inch binder