PRADA GROUP has hired Sir Ridley Scott, the Hollywood director of Gladiator and Blade Runner, to produce its first television advertising campaign as part of a push into the cut-throat perfume market.
The commercials, which will cost the Italian fashion house several million pounds, are expected to be aired in Britain next month, over Easter. The ads will be cut from a short film produced by Sir Ridley and his film director daughter Jordan.
Miuccia Prada, the company’s co-owner and creative head, told The Times that she had resisted launching a perfume for almost a decade because of her aversion to mass marketing. “That requires mass banality,” she said.
Mrs Prada’s solution was to hire Ridley Scott Associates to shoot the multimillion-pound short film, Thunder Perfect Mind, which was unveiled at the Berlin Film Festival this week. She took the unusual step of designing the commercials herself, rather than employ an advertising agency.
Prada’s campaign, which will be released in formats ranging from 10 seconds to 45 seconds, follows moves by other luxury brands to enlist Hollywood’s biggest names to produce highly stylised commercials that attempt to blur the lines between art and commerce.
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Chanel recently relaunched its No 5 perfume with a six-minute commercial directed by Baz Luhrmann, who was behind Moulin Rouge, and starring Nicole Kidman. The production reportedly cost £18 million, making it minute-for-minute the most expensive film in history. The latest Guinness commercials, which show a criminal taming a wild stallion, were directed by Anthony Minghella, whose credits include The English Patient.
The expansion into fragrances comes at a critical juncture for Prada, which recently parted ways with two of its high-profile designers, Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, and is said to be weighing up a multibillion-pound flotation.
The commercials are the culmination of years of hand-wringing over how to promote the company to a mass audience while retaining the brand’s exclusivity.
The film shows a young woman meandering through various Berlin scenes and reading poetry to a jazz score. The commercial’s soft-sell approach means that there is no reference to perfume and the Prada brand is not revealed until the final shot.
“We tried to do it in a very beautiful way,” Mrs Prada said. “We decided to do the movie because it’s better than doing a standard TV commercial. It’s more difficult. It’s more complicated, but it’s better.”
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She added: “This is not a branding exercise. I never in my life thought about Prada as a brand. In our company that word isn’t banned exactly but it isn’t used. No-one talks about it that way. We talk about doing something well. It sounds stupid but it’s probably the secret of our success.”
The perfumes, which will include a men’s version later this year, are being produced through a joint venture with Puig.
Manuel Puig Rocha, the chief executive of Puig and a Prada board member, said: “We started on the fragrance about five years ago, from scratch.
“In Prada we always like to have a different way with everything. We look to the trend and then ask how we could do it another way. That is the way to add value, so long as you do it intelligently.”