Fashion website claims it was ‘banned’ from using Lenovo tablets at Melbourne Fashion Festival

So many questions. Lets start with two obvious ones: How much dosh have Lenovo paid Couturing? What about the clothes makers, remember them?

Really, who cares what paid bloggers, many of whom have inflated worth based on dubious social media followers, have to say on a subject they know little about.

Sure, people should make money for work done, but to marginalise journalists, the organisers of VAMFF and the clothes makers to favour of a parasitic campaign cheekily set-up to piggy back an event set up, let’s not forget, by not-for-profit, in order to make a profit stinks to high heaven.

There’s a big question here about ethics. Sure, bloggers should expect some payment, but many of them have no clue about journalistic ethics. If you expect to be paid by a commercial venture, you MUST declare you’ve been paid and not abandon objectivity. Most of all, surely you should endeavour to present some sort of informed analysis about FASHION or the MAKING OF CLOTHES somewhere on your publication? Or am I being naive?

“At the end of the day, we are all here to do the same thing, promote the designers”… Oh please. You’re being paid to promote Lenovo. Who is Teh trying to kid?

“The duo are ambassadors for the showcase, which they were also covering on behalf of Couturing.”

So much going wrong in so few words.

What a joke! This totally produced youtube piece promotes the Adephi hotel, who obviously provided them with rooms for free and Lenovo whose tablet appears at least twenty times throughout the piece. At the same time Virgin Australia the major sponsor is never mentioned or seen on screen and no other sponsor except Cosmo is mentioned or seen. She doesn’t do any review of the fashion, designers or anything about the show. Based on the total commercialism of these bloggers they shouldn’t have any followers and should be banned for not giving an independent story and review on Runway 6. They are being bought and it is disgraceful.

This story is so unworthy of being the top of the Mumbrella homepage.

What a joke. You have no right to expect an invite-only event grant you unconditional access to film your ad. Completely ridiculous.

Love this : our social media noise beat theirs! so there! |

“…. Samsung originally promoted the #VAMFF hashtag a few days earlier in the week then stopped when our social media noise eclipsed theirs,” said Teh.
So very 2015!

Oh paid blogger tears. How good they taste. Can’t say I feel for them or Lenovo in this case, as I’m sure they still got paid. Was getting this on mumbrella just a way of getting the partnership more PR?

Also, that video was so cringe. Was more focused on the brands who gave them free stuff than any fashion.

I’m very confused by this out cry.

Were the ‘How Two’ bloggers and Couturing told they were ‘banned’ or not? It’s fair to say, that no one should lie about a situation and you can completely understand that if the ‘How Two’ bloggers put themselves in a situation where they were sitting front row for the festival and promised work to the Couturing crew, they probably put themselves in a situation of conflicting interest.

Plus, the Bloggers were hardly filming themselves with the tablet anyway, it was a video camera following them around.

Sounds like a sad over reaction on Couturing’s behalf and it’s a shame that the blogging community are being dragged down…

It seems these influencers (perhaps bloggers) have put themselves in a sticky business situation – gone wrong – by over commiting themselves. Lesson to be learnt for poor business decisions, not tarnish the reputation of the festival, who value all media and their promotion.

Its a joke? Lenovo is very fashionable:)

thats called using a media partnership as a Trojan horse to shoot an ad for a rivals product without paying any rights fees. With fashion week and Samsung all the way through this episode of cheap ambush marketing dressed up as support for emerging talent. Come on.

Why is Instagram even credible. I could hand over 100 bucks and harness tens of thousands of followers in a few minutes. See for yourself, do a search for ‘buy Instagram followers’.
One company I looked at boasted this tagline: 1,000,000 happy customers can’t be wrong.
Who are these ‘happy customers’? More to the point: why do lazy PRs and businesses continue to put stock in Instagram?

You could have thousands of followers like many ‘popular’ instagrammers, but one look at the engagement level of your posts and you can easily be picked out as phoney among the rest of them.

There are influencers out there with a good engagement level, and I would say those are credible platforms to market products on. It’s the industry that needs to be educated on how to pick out between a real influencer who post engaging content with lots of likes and genuine comments, to those who have a massive follower base but a low number of comments and likes.

It’s funny to see Couturing/Lisa Teh having such knee jerk reaction to the whole drama, not a very wise way to be representing her company. Seems like she also deleted all her tweets following a lengthy row with a Feltt blogger from today.

At the end of the day, the real winner here would be Lenovo who’s sitting by the sidelines getting all the attention, while the media focuses on the wrong point of the issue and play it out like Samsung/VAMFF are big bullies for banning the bloggers from using those devices. The biggest loser from this being Couturing. They should have backed down instead of barking around when a conflict of interest was realised by VAMFF. Whether intentional or not on their part, their in the wrong here ethically and the unnecessary noise they caused by crying about the ban first on Twitter will probably affect their business badly moving forward. I wonder what fashion shows they get to cover next. Definitely not the next VAMFF and doublfully MBFW if their PR is smart.

Their weak responses also just caused them to lose more respect from the industry.
“we need to make money somehow” > This seems to be a regular response their giving. Of course you do, but do it ethically and by playing nice or you’re just making enemies and risking your business, and unfortunately you have. I’m pretty sure the staff at Couturing don’t unanimously believe they were in the right.
“Lenovo supported us in promoting the show eventho Samsung was involved” > Of course they would, paying chump change to get massive marketing reach. Their support means nothing and is totally irrelevant.
“Disappointed can’t promote emerging designers” > Other than the 1,000-ish pageviews those Lenovo produced and focused YouTube videos, those bloggers are still able to take Instagram photos, and write engaging blog post content to share. Again an irrelevant and weak response. All you’re disappointed about is not being able to fulfil your commitment to Lenovo. Those cringeworthy videos are not even engaging and focusing on the items on the runway.

Personally I do think bloggers have a place in these shows, but in this case they’ve been exploited and painted in a bad way by a loud mouth.

As well as buying Instagram followers, you can also buy likes to accompany any post. Many people with huge follower numbers have relatively few posts. Why, you ask? Well it’s because each post has an engagement spend associated with it. That’s right, you can upload a photo, spend some money on a ‘buy likes’ service and hey presto! your new post appears to have thousands on likes or, as they say, ‘engagement’. The whole platform is total bogus. Do a search for ‘buy Instagram likes/ engagement’

The tweet you have pictured above just showed up in my Twitter feed as an officially promoted tweet by Lenovo ANZ….

Yep Totally believe this “controversy” was organic.