brand-e

By Simon Fuller. Clothes cast. Benetton wants you. If you have a style all your own, that is. The Italian clothing brand has rolled out a casting competition, It’s:My:Time, in an effort to find a score of people to become its faces of tomorrow. So, it’s inviting those who think they’ve got personality enough to upload photos and videos to the Benetton site and to YouTube – summing up their look in the process – with site users then voting for their favourites in typical crowdsourcing fashion.
The prize? Those among the top 20 can expect to be whisked to the Big Apple to take part in a fashion shoot and then feature in Benetton’s campaign for autumn/winter 2010. Those getting into the top 100 will get a place in a guide to style, along with brand vouchers.
“Benetton has always been inspired by ‘what’s happening outside’ and especially in the last two years we have experimented a lot on the Net side [of things],” says the brand. “The inspirations come from the question of how to merge old and new media: the traditional ‘papered’ campaigns and the web. [We are] mixing these apparently contradictory elements and building a big container to mix together the old media and the new trends in web communication, young people and [older] people, the online and the offline worlds, tradition and innovation. [That] is how this experiment was born.”
Benetton is confident that each aspect of the It’s:My:Time campaign will go viral, through social networks and the blogosphere. The brand has had a great response to the casting element, notching up over more than 7,500 entries to date.
And Benetton is supporting the campaign via the It’s:My:Time blog, which features entries made by popular bloggers from around the world.
“We want to understand what it means to be a teenager today, what kind of events… are happening exactly now around the world,” say the brand. “We feel this campaign will be a true ‘global’ initiative, where global [isn’t] a geographical meaning only, but a ‘human’ meaning as well, that is able to involve anyone in the world that can accesses the Net.”
Benetton is also deploying campaign print ads carrying digital coding which enables access to interactive augmented reality content online.
“The AR technology helps to break the barrier from real to virtual – the code in this campaign will open [up] access to video content related to the image we publish,” say Benetton, promising further engagement with this technology at a later date. “For the future we are working on [an] innovation that will permit…access to the multimedia contents on the net directly from the image, without the AR code.”
The contest is running from until March, with the winners being announced on the 18th of that month.