Donna Block
Cooking up a little something for Valentine’s Day? How about this. A little sport, a dash of sex, a pinch of Wall Street and a lot of the Internet, and what have you got? The recipe for “sexcess”.
This is what happened on Super Bowl Sunday when a 30-second advert promoting Victoria’s Secret’s live lingerie fashion show from Wall Street, filled with supermodels in their underwear strutting their stuff to an intense drum beat, filled the airwaves.
Within an hour, more than a million people – five times the normal volume – visited the company’s fledgling website for a peek at what was on offer. Online sales were more than triple the usual daily amount. There were also full- page newspaper ads – featuring models in their knickers – and a deluge of ads on every major financial website.
A million hits on http://www.victoriassecret.com>, and all it took was 30 seconds and the most watched sporting event in the United States.
But, without a doubt, this was an ad campaign that unabashedly and blatantly pushed every button for the male of the species. Scantily clad women! Wall Street! The Internet! Men everywhere were under a spell. How could they get so lucky – and they didn’t even have to leave home.
The company handling the transmission of the show, Broadcast.com, thought it was prepared. It was expecting even more Web visitors than it had on September 21, when about a million people viewed videotapes of US President Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony. It bought an additional 120 server computers and had more than 1 000 servers online to handle the traffic.
Unfortunately by show time, although it was clear that the retailer of racy lingerie had successfully bought a lot of attention, the steamy Internet fashion show was a bust for many users because millions of fans overloaded the site. The transmission was garbled and “fuzzy” – a big disappointment.
But the event itself and the bevy of buxom beauties in the ads were a ground breaking effort by Victoria’s Secret’s parent, Intimate Brands Inc., to promote its corporate image to investors along with its lingerie. The company even managed to have one of the models, dressed in a nightie, ring the closing bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on the day of the show.
By its own admission, the retailer was walking a fine line. It’s estimated that although women account for 90% of sales at Victoria’s Secret, they were none too thrilled about the campaign. But, men are important constituents for Victoria’s Secret, too. They shop at the store for Valentine’s Day presents and they also buy stock.
Nonetheless, such a transparent use of sex to sell stock brought a blush to the cheeks of some media types. But even so, a sizable publicly- held company like Intimate Brands, which is skilled and more than capable of marketing itself to institutions through full-time investor-relations efforts, conference calls and meetings with professional money managers, had found the small retail investor more elusive. Well, not anymore.