New Brand Journalism: how is branded content changing in the fashion industry? Brands become publishers again, adding a new space to their digital ecosystem

Branded content marketing, native advertising, sponsored content. These have been the keywords of digital publishing in the last ten years: various definitions that have filled the mouths and notebooks of the notes of accounts, brand strategists and social media managers. Driven by the motto "Every Company is a Media Company", the fashion industry and the magazine sector were the first to experiment with this mechanism that in its essence was a win-win for both parties: brands came into direct contact with a desired audience quickly directly and employing few resources, magazines and influencers managed to keep their identity intact and to make sustainable a business model that until then could not to monetize online presence and reputation. 

The branded content applied to Instagram launched the influencer industry, but from the point of view of blogs and magazines it had to be the magic formula to save digital publishing. Today, however, six years after the boom of this marketing model, brands have changed and with them online communication: many are starting to create in-house magazines for editorial content. Gucci Stories, Issue by Bottega Veneta, Lifewear by Uniqlo, magazine by Louis Vuitton are just some of the examples of new brand journalism that complete - together with social media and e-commerce - the digital ecosystem of a brand.  This is a natural evolution for the fashion industry, at a historic moment when brands are first producers of values and then of clothes and feel the need to have digital spaces less restrictive than an Instagram profile or their e-commerce where they can show the behind the scenes of the brand, have the opportunity to give substance to slogans of sustainability and inclusiveness. It's not the first time that it actually happen: has every trend it is a revamping a wave of brand magazine born in the 00s.

Even on a creative level, branded content influenced the fashion industry: power grew in the hands of independent creative agencies specializing in cool hunting that facilitated the emergence of young creators. On the other hand, critics pointed out that it was another element that contributed to the cultural homogenization of taste within the fashion industry. In addition to the passage of time users notice a sponsored post, lowering the degree of engagement, a survey found that, only between 2011 and 2016, the average number of posts published each month by brands on their corporate sites or blogs had increased by 800%, while the average number of average interactions per post, in contrast , down 89%.

The new brand journalism

Over the past five years, the creative and fashion industry has changed profoundly. Thanks to the transformations that took place in the industry and the work of connecting many magazines, the communication gap that existed ten years ago between public and brand has been drastically reduced. The need is to communicate directly with the public, bringing branded content that lands on magazines within their own digital space, whose name is yet to be defined (brandzine could be, ok). 

Both approaches, however, seem to follow the approach of SSENSE or Mr Porter, both ecommerce magazines that have boomed in recent years. The goal for new brandzines is to offer quality content but above all relevant for users, avoiding overlapping with the work of independent magazines, which at the same time must change skin, evolving from cool hunter to curators, selecting every day the most relevant trends and facts not only remaining in the field of fashion but following the principle of cross-sectorality.