NEW YORK — Ray-Ban wants its customers to make spectacles of themselves.
Fittingly, a blitz across 12 billboards in Times Square Thursday will signal the start of Ray-Ban’s yearlong “Never Hide” campaign, which will make its way via Internet, print, outdoor media, cinema and TV through 37 countries across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.
Touting the message “Never Hide,” Ray-Ban is seeking to affirm its identity as authentic, offbeat and courageous — with a twist of American rebelliousness. The $1.8 billion brand, whose style derives from the people who wear it, is posting to 11 of the Times Square billboards images of customers wearing Ray-Bans, which first made the American scene 70 years ago with the aviator model. The 12th sign, too narrow to portray the digital images of people and their shades, will convey the campaign slogan and the Ray-Ban logo.
“The most fashionable thing you can be is yourself,” said Fabio d’Angelantonio, group marketing director of Ray-Ban parent, Luxottica. The campaign kicks off over six days in Times Square and will include the billboards of Nasdaq and Reuters.
During interviews with people worldwide in the last 12 months, Ray-Ban found that it was associated with independence, a value, d’Angelantonio said, which can help keep the brand relevant.
One reason for the marketing effort, however, is that Ray-Ban’s identity had become unclear, tied too closely to fashion cycles and associations with celebrities from Audrey Hepburn to Bob Dylan to Madonna who have worn the brand’s sunglasses. Celebrities are notably absent from the latest campaign so as not to diminish its message: Everyone can be oneself, should not hide from who they are and, of course, can adopt a pair of Ray-Bans as one mode of self-expression. (Ray-Ban sold some 14 million frames in 2006.)
Another mode of self-expression will take form in the billboard images, which will appear for 14 hours a day, captured by street teams in Manhattan that will photograph people wearing Ray-Bans, if they choose to participate, and by individuals’ own postings to Ray-Ban.com, which went live on Feb. 28. Those who submit photos online will be given a code enabling them to see their images in the south side of Times Square the next day. Teasers inviting the digital photo postings began Friday at MTV.com and Saturday via e-mail from Ray-Ban to Internet users in the U.S., Italy, Spain, France and China.
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The biggest piece of Ray-Ban’s 2007 marketing budget, about 30 percent, is being spent in the U.S., where the brand’s presence will be in fashion and entertainment magazines and in 3,500 of the 3,700 stores Luxottica owns in North America in its Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters and Pearle Vision chains. (For more on Luxottica, see page 17.)
Antonin Kratochvil — whose photographs range from Deborah Harry for an American Civil Liberties Union campaign to Mongolian street children for the Museum of Natural History — is shooting the magazine ads and point-of-sale images. (The effort will extend to another 1,000 of Luxottica’s stores in China, Australia and the U.K., and to a lesser extent will be evident across the 100,000 stores independent of Luxottica that distribute Ray-Bans worldwide.)
The Internet component of Ray-Ban’s new marketing face is getting triple the budget it has been allotted since Luxottica acquired the brand in 1999, said Erika Ferszt, Luxottica’s group advertising and media director. “It is the touchpoint that is closest to the consumer,” she said.
To that end, Ray-Ban is in talks with MySpace, the Internet social network, where in May it hopes to begin posting the work of five up-and-coming movie directors whom the brand has invited to make videos of what it means to never hide. It also plans to post those works, as well as other such efforts, at YouTube and Ray-Ban.com.
In May, the advertising will start appearing in both edgier and wide-reach magazines likely to include Rolling Stone, Spin, Elle, Allure, Interview and Radar, and in commercials in movie theaters and on TV. “The TV spot feels like one long single take, but it will portray a series of stories through the reflections of different characters’ sunglasses,” explained Chuck McBride, executive creative director at TBWAChiatDay in San Francisco.
The TV spots are expected to air first in Mexico, Italy and India; the movie theater commercials will be screened initially in France and Spain. None of the 30-, 60- and 90-second TV or theatrical commercials will be seen in the U.S., though, as Ray-Ban’s American customer does not watch a lot of TV or regularly visit movie houses, Ray-Ban brand director Marcello Favagrossa said. The spots were directed by Michael Haussman, whose previous work includes campaigns for Levi’s, Adidas, BMW, Coca-Cola and Vodafone.