How Urban Outfitters Are Doing "Haul" Videos Right
A teenager walks into a store, shops 'til she drops, comes home, turns on the Flip camera and gushes about the loot. Moments later, the booty's uploaded to YouTube and the store(s) she trawled get some serious (mostly free) viral promotion. The marketing phenomena otherwise known as the "haul" video is catching on with retailers such as JCPenney (JCP) and Forever 21. But now that Urban Outfitters (URBN) joined the haul party, competitors are going to get schooled.
Ironically, the biggest threats to haul videos are the retailers themselves. Once a department store or fast fashion chain muscles in to grab the attention of teen shoppers, the whole, fresh, thoroughly-user-generated shine gets tarnished.
Sure the kids get free threads, products, or gift cards to spend (while more popular haulers Elle and Blair Fowler are in talks for lucrative contracts) but with current FTC regulations on disclosure, the retailer-backed efforts are a far cry from the gush and rush of a genuine haul.
Witness Annie as she very clearly prefaces -- six seconds in-- her 3:36 minute spiel for her JCPenney back-to-school spree: "Now they did provide me with a gift card--" which makes the entire rest of her video feel like a commercial rather than a conspiratorial chat between friends.
Urban Outfitters sidestepped this pitfall with an elegant solution to capture the haulers and their audience: a contest. Wannabe v-loggers have the chance to win a $500 gift card by uploading a haul to YouTube.The videos are judged on equal parts of creativity, enthusiasm, interest, style, and overall presentation.
To get the ball rolling on its contest, Urban is featuring a haul from devotee TheReal Flavs (sorry, she doesn't give her actual name) in which she dishes about vintage-inspired details, the merits of scalloped edging, and her clutch of new rompers, "A lot of girls say they're afraid to wear them, I don't know why. I'm obsessed -- and Urban has the best ones."It's certainly possible that that Flav's video was generated by Urban specifically to entice contestants -- but no matter. The point is that Urban is pushing a format decidedly free of overt sponsorship marketing while building up a loyal customer base (something it's already doing on Facebook with "How You Wore It").
Snagging shoppers who are in it for the thrill of the hunt as well as the possibility of snapping up some store bucks on the back end, means they'll come back to spend when they tire of their latest haul. In this way, Urban's constructed a winning marketing campaign and retail cycle, all for the cost of a few hundred bucks.
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