Angela Natividad's Live & Uncensored!

11 June 2010

"Hello": Agent Provocateur's '09 Social Media Foray

I was really impressed by "Hello" when it came out; it had a low-key attitude with a wit and intelligence that I found intuitively sexy. Finally: lingerie marketed to real-life grown-up women!* I read the blog, I followed the tweets. That persona - intuitive and truthful, fallibly human - is what convinced me to walk into an Agent Provocateur store for the first time.

(And I bought things! So many things!)

This video falls flat in comparison, though. The script is poor, that background music is lame, there are no statistics. I don't really understand why it exists, apart from that it half-heartedly revives memory of a promising campaign that was snuffed, inexplicably, shortly after launch.

The blog is dead, and @msprovocateur pretty much stopped tweeting a breath after she began. Today you can follow @DollyHill, whose AP-approved persona is less human and more generically salesy. (She used to be colourful and complain about how she hated getting catcalls from construction workers. Now she just plugs deals. She still responds to people though, but only in a Corporate Is Watching uber-positive way.)

You look at an Agent Provocateur ad, and there is nothing about it that screams safe. That's why "Hello" started out so well: it proposed to stimulate intelligent women because it appeared to be run by an intelligent woman who didn't mind everyone knowing her preference for lacy knickers. That's incredibly sexy. What happened?


---

*Fun fact: Victoria's Secret's largest customer base falls between the ages of 13 and 17.

1 comment:

Cynthia said...

What is the video being used for? Sounds like something a company does to talk about itself, for investors or educational purposes - versus sales.

BUT ... thanks for calling it out.