Clippers for hire
The glossy campaign is still the ultimate vanity project for fashion houses. It’s why the likes of Gucci, Prada and Chanel have recently released high-budget short films. “Many brands feel like they’re already pivoting toward this. Episodic, serialized content and microdramas are everywhere right now,” says McCord, citing examples like Marc Jacobs’s The Scene, Ferragamo’s seven-chapter La Prima Impressione and Away’s eight-episode Actually Away.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what’s cutting through. “Spending a ton of money on a beautiful campaign film does not automatically mean that it is going to be the thing people actually share or watch,” says Amirzadeh. There’s an opportunity for brands to hire a clipper agency, or assemble their own coterie of clippers, to cut up runway shows and presentations, A-B-Z test captions and cross-pollinate a diverse range of followers. “Instead of one polished brand post, you get hundreds or thousands of clippers putting their own spin on the content, each reaching a different audience segment,” says Stanfield. “That diversity of voice tends to build more trust than a single branded post, and trust is what drives conversion. We’ve seen this play out clearly in gaming and music, and the underlying psychology should hold for fashion too,” he continues. It’s a Gestalt shift in who’s sitting in the director’s chair. “The brand does not necessarily make the footage that defines the moment anymore. The brand makes the moment, and everyone else makes the footage,” says Amirzadeh.
Adding paid spend can further turbocharge this effect. “What we see work really well is running paid media at the same time as the clipping campaign instead of doing one after the other. That way the same person might see you multiple times across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, but you are getting a lot of those touchpoints extremely cheaply through clipping,” says Amirzadeh. Cheaply being the key word: “We deliver verified views at roughly $1-4 per thousand, compared to $10-25+ for paid social,” he says. The other way is putting paid spend behind organic-tested clips, or, as Amirzadeh says, “you can run the ad directly from the clipper’s own handle using TikTok Spark codes, which we surface to brands inside our platform.”
It’s vital, though, to premeditate this and consider portion sizes before cooking up a batch of fresh content. Where podcasts need soundbites, campaigns need videobites. “Brands that shoot with clipping in mind, thinking about which moments will stand alone as a 10 to 30-second clip, get dramatically more value out of the same production budget,” says Stanfield. “This is probably the highest-leverage change a brand can make right now. Internally, we call it content engineering,” says Amirzadeh. “Clips used to just be a byproduct of long-form content. You would make the long-form piece and then figure out what you could cut from it afterward. Now you should almost be doing the opposite.”
Whether that leads people to seek out the more fruitful source material needs testing. “I think runway video clipping lacks that; it doesn’t entice me to want to see the whole collection outside of a ‘hmm that’s cool’ and scroll past,” says Yip. “This may be the obstacle to clipping being properly utilized in fashion. It isn’t a clipping problem; it is a funnel problem. The clips lack proper attraction and incentive for viewers to want to interact with the primary text.”
