It wasn’t long ago when Pete Davidson ‘took over’ Calvin Klein’s Instagram account, changing the brand’s display photo to one of himself, posting in Calvin Klein gear and even live streaming with Machine Gun Kelly. In the hour-long livestream, the two were seen eating, chilling, chatting and eventually stripping down to their Calvin Klein underwear, of course.
As TikTok-er @girlbosstown pointed out, aside from being entertaining, this seemed to be a random but quite effective and smart standalone marketing campaign from the fashion brand. Calvin Klein are effectively capitalising on the fact that Pete has periodically deleted his own account, and thus people would go to Calvin Klein’s account to get their Pete Davidson content fix.
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However, contrary to this Pete-centric theory, it seems that this was only the start of a series of ‘takeovers’. Squid Game star and Louis Vuitton ambassador HoYeon Jung was the next celeb to take over the brand’s Instagram account. Posting a selfie in all CK and live-streaming both her morning routine and dinner, the star also changed the brand’s profile photo to a selfie. In this ‘hack’, Jung shared that ‘Calvin Klein gave (her) the password’ in a post’s caption, hinting at the nature of the campaign as a takeover rather than commercial feature.
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Similarly, Valentino announced that they would be handing over the reins of their Instagram account to Milan’s emerging designers for fashion month. Kicking off next February with Marco Rambaldi, Valentino will exclusively showcase Rambaldi’s work on their page and then continue to spotlight guest designers each season going forward.
Instead of employing celebrities as an interactive marketing campaign like Calvin Klein, this move from Valentino sees them use their elevated platform and following to highlight the emerging fashion talent Milan has to offer – perhaps a more subtle marketing move in itself.
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Elsewhere, we’ve become accustomed to the practice of brands deleting all existing posts in the run up to releasing a new collection or a big announcement. A tactic used to create hype by the Kardashians and their brands, as well as Ye and Balenciaga, this quite often leads to long periods of time with an empty feed. In a way, these brands are also giving up their Instagram by removing all content from their pages.
Whether these brand moves are signalling a shift towards more inventive marketing on social media, takeovers and other unconventional marketing tactics have been used in advertising for years. In a somewhat ironic conclusion, the most effective way to use Instagram seems to be not using it at all: whether that’s by handing over control to celebrities to create content, a designer to showcase their latest collections, or by just removing all traces of content altogether.
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