Making waves in the Social Video Age. "The content conundrum ? Reaching the right crowd in an appropriate context with high-quality, on brand content." Discover more about social media, social video content and the art of storytelling. Presented to You by Ykone Agency.

1. INSIGHT Nº 2 / 19TH JUNE 2014
VIDEOSYNCRASY:
Making Waves in the Social Video Age
A production by Paris & New York

2. INSIGHTS / 19TH JUNE 2014
INSIGHT Nº 2
CONTENTS
02
Video Killed the Radio Star
03 – 05
The Big Bang and the Beygency
07 – 10
From Going Rogue to Landing Vogue
11 – 13
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
05
A Tale As Old As Time
16
Language is Skin
17
Youtube? Yes You Phan
18
A Brand Built on Video
19 – 21
From Upscale Vlogger to
Up-and-coming Blogger...
25 – 26
Beneath the Surface: The Vimeo Equation
27 – 28
In The Future, Everyone Will Be
World-famous For 15 Seconds…
01

3. INSIGHTS NO. 2
VIDEO KILLED
THE
RADIO STAR
WORDS by YKONE’S EDITORIAL TEAM
t was just past midnight on August 1st 1981
when MTV aired its first ever music video. The
clip chosen to represent this landmark event?
Video Killed the Radio Star by British new wave
band The Buggles. A biting comment on the
potentially ‘lethal’ cultural impact of audiovisual
technology on the music industry, it couldn’t have
come at a better time. At the dawn of the 80’s, users
began consuming video in new ways and in new
contexts: VCR and VHS, pausing and playing,
rewinding and restarting, tuning in to MTV before
shelling out on CDs… A technological and cultural
phenomenon which connected artists and
audiences as never before. Revolutionary? You bet.
And yet something was still missing from the
equation…
02

4. “
”
INSIGHTS NO. 2
THE CONTENT
CONUNDRUM? REACHING
THE RIGHT CROWD, IN AN
APPROPRIATE CONTEXT
WITH HIGH-QUALITY,
ON-BRAND CONTENT.
03

5. INSIGHTS NO. 2
THE BIG BANG AND
THE BEYGENCY
astfoward to 2014, and the video scene
would seem to have come full circle.
Almost a decade after the first ever
video was added to YouTube, over one
hundred hours of content are uploaded
to the video hosting platform every minute by
generation ‘C’ millenials who, not content with
consuming content from their favourite artists and
brands, are busying creating and curating
their own. In a world where it would take us several
million years to watch a month’s worth of online
video, and where diffusion is no longer a one-way
street, video is both an unprecedented
marketing opportunity and a real challenge
strategically. The content conundrum? Reaching
the right crowd, in an appropriate context with
high-quality, on-brand content.
Not sure what we mean? Just ask pop music’s video
content queen. For her latest launch, Beyoncé
changed the rules of the game, releasing the first
ever ‘visual album’, comprising 14 tracks and 17
videos. This ambitious project entailed revealing all
the clips simultaneously as part of an immersive
online video experience. Video was no longer to be
seen as an accessory to the music; it was part of a
bigger audiovisual picture. But it didn’t stop there.
With just one 15-second Instagram video, Beyoncé
surprised her fans with news of a new album.
600,000 likes and several million sales later, the
social experience continued to grow with directors’
cuts, inspirations and interviews posted to
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. A
multi-channel, self-sufficient ‘seeding’ strategy that
singlehandedly earned the singer the title of best
selling album of all time on iTunes. Ultimately,
though, the secret to the Beygency’s success relies
on more than just music; it’s about mastering
modern media.
Her latest magnum opus? An advert for the
forthcoming On The Run tour with Jay Z, which is, in
fact, anything but… Presented as a fictional trailer,
the short film stars the couple alongside Hollywood
stars Sean Penn, Jake Gyllenhaal and Blake Lively.
Insolent in content, influential in community,
perfectly in context, RUN blurs the lines between
traditional advertising and content creation, leaving
8 million Vevo viewers all asking the same question:
“When will we see the main feature?”. “Coming
Never”, say Beyoncé and Jay Z. Video may well have
killed the radio star, but it gave birth to a whole new
generation of social media seers…
04

6. INSIGHTS NO. 2
‘RUN’ by Beyoncé x Jay Z: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNcJg5svv9A
05
03

7. 1
CHAPTER I:
THE GAME CHANGER

8. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER I
“
TO MAKE
VIDEO
MEANINGFUL,
YOU HAVE TO
PRACTISE
ACCESSIBILITY
AND
AUTHENTICITY.
”
07

9. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER I
FROM GOING
ROGUE TO
LANDING VOGUE
We know what you’re thinking: that’s all well and good,
but what happens when you don’t have a Beyoncé-sized
budget and backing? As a handful of forward-thinking
fashion houses have shown, high-impact, high-quality
video is about creative rather than financial investment.
08

10. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER I
ack in 2010, all major
fashion houses had but one
obsession: putting out a
fashion film to accompany
their seasonal ad campaigns.
While many were happy to
opt for the commonplace
‘behind-the-scenes’ scenario,
one contender in particular
stood out with a viral video
that knocked the competition into submission:
Lanvin. If there’s one artist that seems a thousand
leagues from the haute société of the Faubourg
Saint- Honoré, it’s probably Pitbull. And yet with a
little help from one of the most mainstream global
artists of the day, Alber Elbaz and Steven Meisel set
the web alight with their witty, perfectly executed
couture dance routine. While the average Lanvin
campaign receives somewhere in the region of
90,000 YouTube views, this one hit 100,000 in just 3
days, going on to clock up almost a million.
Meanwhile, the Prada FW11 campaign, a stricter
reflection of the brand’s codes also shot by Meisel for
that same season, never made it past the 30k mark…
Metrics are about much more than mere numbers,
though, and by understanding social video culture
Lanvin succeeded in leveraging humour and pop
culture to bring niche fashion to the masses,
increasing brand notoriety and ensuring effortless
media coverage. From Vogue to Mashable and LOL
of The Day, everyone wanted a piece of the Lanvin x
Pitbull pie. Then came the spoofs, proof, if ever
there was, of a successful YouTube video. In a
trailblazing role reversal, stills from the film even
went on to provide campaign shots published in the
coveted Vogue September Issue. It just goes to
show: when making video content, context and
crowd essentially mean power. The online video
community loves nothing more than a little
humour, and what Lanvin grasped earlier than most
is that to make video meaningful, you have to
practise accessibility and authenticity.
09

11. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER I
10

12. TECHCRUNCH / NEW YORK 2014
INSIGHTS / CHAPTER I
“
”
VIDEO IS NOT ABOUT
CREATING MINUTES,
IT’S ABOUT CREATING
MOMENTS.
03
11

13. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER I
KISS KISS,
BANG BANG
12
ust as we all remember where we were the first
time we kissed, we probably recall equally well
the very first time we laid eyes on First Kiss. In
a stripped-back setting, a series of surprisingly
stylish strangers prepare to lock lips for the
first time. Touching? Absolutely. Suspicious? Maybe
just a little... But we all let our faith in human nature
get the better of us from time to time. A beautiful,
documentary-style black and white short film, First
Kiss had a secret to tell…
After going viral on social media and racking up
several million views in just a few hours, the news
broke: First Kiss was, in fact, a fashion film by
up-and-coming LA label Wren Studio. Cue the
critics, skeptics and cynics. As Melissa Coker and
Tatia Pilieva, the creative minds behind the project,
were hauled over the coals for their
‘unconventional’ approach to branding, social
media experts praised what was soon referred to as
possibly “the most successful fashion film ever
made.”
The irony of the situation? First Kiss was initially
launched as part of Style.com’s Video Fashion Week,
an initiative intended to offer visibility to brands
without the means to fund a full-blown runway
show. As former Vogue editor-at-large and boss to
Coker André Leon Talley so rightly points out, “She
gets better attention than an actual fashion show in
fashion week.” With just over three minutes as
opposed to the 15-minute runway standard and with
far less overheads, First Kiss has garnered 83 million
views and 50,000 comments on YouTube in a
forthnight. When you compare it to Louis Vuitton’s
latest epic installment of L’Invitation au Voyage
starring David Bowie, which has taken seven
months to reach to 33 million views, what started
out as a video sent to just 20 friends on Facebook is
clearly a killer piece of content, in or out of context.
Our focus may not be on the clothes and Wren
Studio may not be selling many more dresses as a
consequence, but the real question is: would the
film have been so successful beyond the fashion
crowd had it been heavily branded, and was that
even the point? We’ll never know. At the very least, a
recent study by Axonn Research suggests that 7 in 10
people view brands in a more positive light after
watching interesting viral video content from them.
More importantly, though, director Tatia Pilieva
believes that the key to video “is not about creating
minutes, it’s about creating moments.” With its
perfectly-dosed blend of sincerity and spontaneity,
First Kiss redefines the limits of the social fashion
film, an outsider achievement second only in
volume and impact to the stature of Beyoncé and co.

14. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER I
‘First Kiss’ by Wren Studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpbDHxCV29A
13

15. 2
CHAPTER II:
THE STORYTELLER

16. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER II
A TALE AS
OLD AS TIME
15
ince time immemorial, the tenet
governing the art of successful
storytelling has remained unchanged. In
the words of the Roman lyric poet
Horace, “one gains universal applause
by mingling the useful with the agreeable”. 2000
years on, little has changed. The storytellers of yore?
We now know them as Viners or Vloggers. The
‘useful’ part of the equation? Think of it as a ‘how to’
or ‘DIY’ tutorial. And the fun? Therein lies the secret
to harnessing your crowd’s full potential: working
with the most influential and approachable
‘friendly’ faces in online video to collaborate on
powerful, relatable brand content.
Whether it be Vine artist Meagan Cignoli creating
award-winning #fixinsix video tutorials for
American household name Lowe or portraying
make-up made easy for Yves Saint Laurent Beauté,
the message is very much the same: less focus on
advertising the product and more time spent
enjoying and understanding it. An art form in its
own right, Twitter’s six-second video platform
generates no less than five tweets per second
containing a Vine link. Though Vine may initially
seem to be challenging brands with its creative
constraints including limited expression and zero
editing features, its rapidity and authenticity are
qualities which have only served to bolster the Vine
community’s interest. That’s surely all the more
reason to leave it up to the professionals. Take
PAULE KA, for example, who just named Meagan
their World Wise Woman of the month. Without
ever joining the platform, the brand commissioned
a series of vines in the manner of digital portraits
which now hang in the Tumblr gallery as well as on
Meagan’s account: her content, her crowd, her rules.
In the words of Meagan, “Vine is a completely new
world and has its own set of rules – I think this has
given me an opportunity to shine”. With a 450,000
strong following and several prestigious short film
awards under her belt, Meagan has built a social
media empire as a short format, stop-motion
specialist. Her winning formula? Impeccable quality
and a strong sense of community.

17. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER II
LANGUAGE
IS SKIN
16
hen theorist Roland Barthes
wrote that ‘language is a
skin’, little did he imagine
the day would actually dawn
when skin would quite
literally become one of the most powerful
languages on the web. Welcome to the world of the
‘beauty besties’, an industry that represents
several billion dollars and over 700 million
YouTube hits per month. As of last year, more than
120 million ‘how-to’ and beauty tutorials were
being watched every day, making beauty the
most searched for content on the platform. With
such powerful business potential, it may seem
surprising to learn from a recent Pixability paper
that only 3% of the 14,9 billion beauty-related
videos in existence are actually a product of brand
initiative. This means that vloggers, haul girls and
beauty fans are in fact controlling 97% of the
conversation around beauty brands on YouTube.
With jaw-dropping statistics such as these, clever
crowdsourcing must surely become key, and
meaningful collaboration a no-brainer.

18. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER II
YOUTUBE?
YES YOU PHAN
Michelle Phan, 27 yrs old, 6 million+ YouTube followers
17
Michelle Phan
hought Beyoncé was big? Guess again.
There’s a young beauty enthusiast
who has nearly five times as many
subscribers to her name: Michelle
Phan. What started with a homemade
beauty vlog uploaded to YouTube back in 2007 has
grown organically into a three-billion-view strong
social media empire. As the platform proudly
proclaims, people no longer search for ‘smoky eye’
or ‘lip liner’; they start by searching for Phan. One
brand who saw the potential in Phan’s simple,
accessible video tutorial format early on was
Lancôme. By giving her a voice and a choice (she
wasn’t bound to promote Lancôme alone), Michelle
maintained her editorial integrity while showing her
loyal followers how to have fun with the brand’s best
products. Looking beyond revenue alone secured
Lancôme a stellar e-reputation thanks to
endorsement than no level of conventional brand
content could ever achieve.
0:02 / 6:00
Subscribe
6,546,320
54,176,058
105,378 1,705

19. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER II
A BRAND BUILT
ON VIDEO
ith her low-cost, high-impact
18
videos and close-knit
community, Phan has
sourced her fair share of
product and consumer
insights over the last seven years. So much so that
she would go on to build her very own social-driven
cosmetics label, EM, in partnership with L’Oréal
Luxe. An intelligent exchange that gave Phan the
product she longed for and L’Oréal the platform
they dreamed of. In a video posted to present the
final product, she tells the story of her evolution,
thanking her fans for their involvement and
encouragement. From community comments she
created a full-blown community platform, where
EM fans can post their own looks and tips while
enjoying shoppable video tutorials from Phan. All of
which ties neatly back into the origins of the project:
YouTube. But Phan isn’t the face and voice of any
one brand, she is the face and voice of an entire
generation. More of a media brand than a make-up
expert, her latest partnership reveals the real power
of user-generated content. In a bold move, Google
has chosen to promote Phan’s beauty channel as
part of the first ever full-scale YouTube advertising
campaign: TV, print, billboards, ads across
brand-owned entities… Bearing in mind that by
2017, 90% of all internet traffic will come from
videos, Google didn’t waste any time declaring war,
such is the value of a woman who is much more than
just a pretty face; Michelle Phan is a full-blown video
media brand.

20. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER II
19

21. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER II
FROM UPSCALE
VLOGGER TO
UP-AND-COMING
BLOGGER...
20
e may not all be blessed with
a Phantastic support system
comprising the biggest
beauty and technology
corporations in the world,
but that might just be an opportunity to reach out to
a whole new generation of vloggers and bloggers
with fresh new perspectives and growing audiences.
Take French fashion sensation Elsa Muse, whose
outsider eye and bold point of view have made her a
firm favourite with brands the world over.
Though video is by no means her speciality or the
origin of her notoriety, Comptoir des Cotonniers
saw the creative potential in Elsa for experimenting
with innovative online content. Armed with little
more than two cameramen and her own directing
talents, she pieced together not just the perfect
fashion wardrobe, but a week-long web series with a
painstakingly simple concept: 1 day, 1 dress, 1 hairdo.
Video is by no means a given for small brands and
small-scale blogs, as it tends to imply big-budget,
heavy production. But therein lies the secret to this
project’s success: keeping it real. Everyday
scenarios, everyday dresses, an everyday girl… does
it get more relatable? But if Elsa’s participation
brought visibility to the brand, engagement came
from an added community dimension: the dress
hunt. Viewers were encouraged to seek out one of
the dresses hidden in the video to be in with a chance
of winning it. All they had to do was click on the
silhouette in question to automatically generate a
tweet and confirm their participation. Add to that
shoppable video technology and you’ve got yourself
the social media holy grail: on-brand video content
in a YouTube friendly context (web series), strong
community (blog collaboration and competition)
and integrated e-commerce (drive to store).

22. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER II
‘ Dress Fashion Week’ by Elsa Muse x Comptoir des Cotonniers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW4-64xLetI
21

23. 3
CHAPTER III:
THE CONTENT FACTORY

24. H
INSIGHTS / CHAPTER III
aving explored both
brands excelling on social media and social media
leaders excelling as brands in the first two parts of
this paper, one question remains: what about those
who are both, or neither, or somewhere in-between.
On both sides of the creative pond, a handful of
video mavericks are slowly but surely rewriting the
rules, operating as fully fledged entities not
dissimilar to the Warholian factory model. History
repeating itself? Indeed, only with two major
differences: technology and community. Their
hallmark? Uncompromising quality and originality.
Video is by no means a given for small brands and
small-scale blogs, as it tends to imply big-budget,
heavy production. But therein lies the secret to this
project’s success: keeping it real.
23

25. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER III
24

26. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER III
BENEATH
THE SURFACE:
THE VIMEO
EQUATION
25
uring a rare interview given as part
of the Intel x Vice Creators Project,
Jérémie Rozan, Creative Director of
Paris-based fashion label and
creative film studio Surface To Air,
made his position on video content crystal clear:
“When insiders tell me things like ‘We want to make
a good movie to create some buzz on the internet’ it
means nothing to me. A good movie is a good movie,
right?” One of the most respected names in the
alternative fashion film industry, Rozan uses his
vision for his own label as a guiding principle for
client briefs. An artistic integrity and 360° approach
that have led him to work with some of the most
prestigious names in fashion, PR and music, such as
Louis Vuitton and Dom Pérignon, Justice and
Kavinsky. Cool kids through and through, you won’t
catch the Surface To Air team hanging around
YouTube anytime soon. They have a strict
Vimeo-only policy, favouring high quality while
actively targeting the creative set. You might be
forgiven for finding this angle somewhat
‘anti-social’, but that’s just the point: by working as a
contemporary collective, they draw on their niche
creative community to leverage influence. Whether
it’s designing a Kavinsky x Surface To Air limited
edition jacket or using Justice’s Planisphere as the
soundtrack to a Louis Vuitton Fine Jewellery video,
they harness the hype potential to the full.

28. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER III
IN THE FUTURE,
EVERYONE WILL BE
WORLD-FAMOUS
FOR 15 SECONDS…
27
ad Warhol lived to experience the
Instagram age, he would undoubtedly
have rethought his most famous
phrase. At a time when anyone can try
their hand at the short format film
with little more than a smartphone and a flash of
inspiration, high quality and high impact don’t
always go hand in hand. On the one hand, the world’s
most powerful bloggers are publishing poor
quality shots of Chanel shopping trolleys garnering
hundreds of thousands of likes, and on the other,
professional photographers are producing
15-second masterpieces that go cruelly unnoticed.
Then there are those, like New York-based digital
artist Jamie Beck, who have built a business out of
influence and inspiration. Judging by her fashion
filmography to date, she looks set to stay around for
far more than just 15 seconds...

29. INSIGHTS / CHAPTER III
“A PICTURE-PERFECT
ILLUSTRATION
OF THE
GENERATION ‘C’
MILLENIAL,
JAMIE BECK
CONSUMES,
CREATES AND
CURATES LIKE
NO OTHER.”
28
It’s no co-incidence that Jamie and husband Kevin
Burg hit the big time, as they started by forging a
niche for themselves with the cinemagraph, a video
format combining never-before-seen photography
techniques and the latest digital technology. Their
smartest move, though, was understanding the
power of context and crowd, which would lead them
to post their cinemagraphs on the Tumblr From Me
To You. A few million impressions and hundreds of
thousands of notes later, creative insiders grew into
fashion admirers, the first of whom was none other
than Oscar de la Renta, who commissioned a series
of motion portraits with
Coco Roca. An ingenious
collaboration that brought
together three of the most
powerful Tumblr voices.
It would have been all too easy
for Beck to content herself
with simply churning out
cinemagraphs, but as a
classically trained artist with a
flair for fashion and an
ever-growing social media
presence, she understood that
content diversity was the
name of the game. Her
traditional-meets-tech
approach and blogging
prowess made her an ideal
ambassador for a number
of high fashion and
jewellery brands, the latest
of which is none other than Chanel.
In an on-going partnership this season, she has
worked on several tailormade projects for France’s
most famous brand, including ‘Monday through
Friday’, a fresh and fun shoot with Lucky Magazine.
During the shoot, Beck put out a playful 15-second
video, shared on her Instagram and Vimeo accounts.
Having already amassed over 100 likes for every
second filmed, the video, which never appeared on
Ann Street Studio, proves that successful video
requires the right content on the right channel.
But it is perhaps Jamie Beck’s latest project with
Chanel which best embodies what videosyncrasy in
the socia video age is all about: appreciating what
makes a video artist different, and providing them
with the means and the space to shine. For L’Instant
Chanel, the house’s first watch advertising
campaign in over 20 years, nothing was left to
chance. Shot by the legendary fashion photographer
Patrick Demarchelier, the campaign stills provided
inspiration for a series of four black-and-white
17-second films. Short and sweet, they have
collectively totalled over 900k views on YouTube.
That’s far more than Karl
Largerfeld’s recent epic
‘Once Upon A Time’
starring Keira Knightley as
Coco Chanel. Surprised? In
a video age where 80% of
all content lasts less than a
minute, you shouldn’t be.
Chanel could quite happily
have stopped there, but
instead commissioned a
short film from Ann Street
Studio. There’s no
mention of L’Instant
Chanel and no apparent
link to the official
campaign; it’s more about
providing a talented and
influential voice in online
video with the opportunity
to comment on her own
relationship with time as a modern audiovisual
artist. The result? ‘Money is Recycled, Time is
Spent’, a heart-rendingly beautiful piece, and
arguably some of Beck’s finest work to date. The
thing that makes it so special? She is at once the star,
the director and the distributor of her own film,
which made a striking debut on Instagram before
premiering on the blog. A picture-perfect
illustration of the Generation ‘C’ millenial, Jamie
Beck consumes, creates and curates like no other.
Therein lies the key to videosyncrasy:
understanding and inspiring. It’s a wrap.

30. INSIGHTS / 19TH JUNE 2014
CREDITS
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Olivier Billon
olivier@ykone.com
ART DIRECTOR
David Corti
david@ykone.com
WRITER/EDITOR
Richard Bridgman
richard@ykone.com
PHOTOGRAPHY
Anna Rakhvalova, Fred W. McDarrah,
Melina Matsoukas, Steven Meisel, Tatia Pileva
ILLUSTRATORS
Anna Ismagilova, Bioraven, Canicula
CONTACT
Ykone, 28 Rue du Sentier
75002 Paris, France
contact@ykone.com
Ykone is a Paris and New-York based agency proud to help Fashion and Luxury brands to connect with their
clients and fans on the social web. We build social media strategies, organize international conferences, manage
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