There’s the fashion (sign me up for oversized blazers, ties on a jumpsuit and daytime sequins please), the drama, the solid one-liners and masterclass in product placement (I see you Starbucks and Diet Coke), not to mention the press tour outfit-brigade on social media and the familiar characters … but what I wasn’t expecting was the movie-version of a walking case study for modern marketing, content, digital vs print and the workplace environment for a woman who genuinely loves what she does …
I went to see “The Devil Wears Prada 2” over the weekend (don’t worry, no big spoiler alerts in this blog!) and I genuinely loved it! I mean, I was an easy customer to please on this occasion because if you have ever heard me talk on a podcast about how I wanted to move to New York after school to work for Vogue Magazine – which prompted me to go to university and study Communications and English – you’ll already know that I love all of that.
I’m the girl who plastered her bedroom walls in the 90’s with fashion shoots and adverts from magazines, I still have back issues of Vogue in my house and in my parent’s house in Cape Town and carried a hardback coffee table book of the 90’s supermodels across the globe when I moved to Scotland in 2003. Like I said, I am an easy customer to love this movie.
Granted, I’m not sure my girlfriend’s who watched alongside me saw the film in the same way I did and they definitely didn’t want to chat about what happens to some industries when technology, content and how audiences consume (all) content come into play … but maybe you do, so here we are.
Now don’t be concerned – AI doesn’t come for “The Devil Wears Prada 2”, the movie (kudos to the writers for this one) captures a moment in time incredibly well – the time being this time. When content is literally everywhere, value vs volume is constantly up for discussion, integrity rages against the algorithm and advertisers / advertising / paying for space can often lead the airspace and the conversation.
What makes the whole thing even more lush, is that all of that is delivered seamlessly by the cast; well I thought it was seamless anyway, as this kind of conversation and hot-take topics is literally my work and takes up so much of my thinking time around the work I do too.
How do we as businesses stay relevant to our target audience on social media? How do we navigate integrity in storytelling vs hooks? How do we merge our experience with technology in a way that is innovative and authentic?
With all of that in mind; here’s some of my marketing hot-takes from the movie:
- Get comfortable with the tension between what performs and what matters. Don’t judge your one-piece-of-content as a stand alone metric, it’s part of your entire marketing ecosystem and not every piece of content will (or should) chase likes, shares or saves. Some of it exists to say something important, to build credibility or to simply be part of a conversation that matters to you and your business values.
- Print vs digital isn’t really the entire question anymore (we already know that nostalgia marketing is a thing), it’s more about value vs volume, and the movie talks to this pressure of keeping something meaningful in a world (and audience) that can too often just reward speed and scale.
- Social media isn’t the bad guy in the movie (spoiler alert: it’s not a person either which is pretty cool really), but it is a player for the team that has more villain-qualities than others. Distribution, attention, content format and algorithms mostly shape what gets seen, not just what gets created and who creates it.
- There’s a difference between content that is “easy” and content that is “worth it” (think sales hooks vs integrity pieces) and knowing when to push for one over the other is a skill that doesn’t sit neatly in a textbook. There’s a reason I push for strategy and target audience conversation when it comes to your marketing, content and social media and that’s because without that foundation and structure you won’t understand what happens to your content once it goes “live” and you won’t know when it needs to be easy or when it needs to be worth it.
- And then there’s the piece about loving your work enough to keep evolving with it and being comfortable to say out loud that you love your work and you love working. To move both with and before the industry changes, to see beyond the job title and understand how your role can grow to take your experience into a different space. That one isn’t strictly marketing-related, but as a woman in business who loves her work, a mother and a woman in her mid-40’s (ish) in the digital marketing industry this one hit home in a super-good way.
So there we go, not the movie review you were expecting I’m sure! I am (of course) more than happy to talk about clothes, one-liners, movie memes, magic moments, who the villain actually is, whether Italy is worth it for a mini-break and if all Australians really do say hi to each other when they leave the country anytime too and you can DM me on Instagram for that chit chat.
For social media and content strategy, audits, 1-2-1s and project work; you can find out more about my work here #BirdandEmmy
