Flipping advertising to girls

“It’s not like anything we’ve done before in that, with this, we don’t have to follow the ASME guidelines on separation of church and state. It’s a very innovative way to market the site and a real pull to advertisers.”

-- Dee Salomon, senior vice president of sales and marketing for CondeNet

This somewhat offhanded dismissal of ad:edit guidelines as a nuisance was made in reference to the Condé Nast launch just two weeks ago, through its online division, of Flip.com. According to a story in Folio:, Flip.com allows young people to make their own "flip books" from all sorts of content and intersperse it with advertising from the likes of cosmetics from Vera Wang, PacSun juices and the Nordstrom department store.

The marketing strategy was two-fold, said the article.

First, CondeNet wanted to deliver to its advertisers a certain age demographic – girls between the ages of 13 and 19. And, second, it wanted to deliver to advertisers a certain psycho-demographic – girls who are creative and artistic. “The advertisers we’ve shown it to are more upscale advertisers who know they want to reach girls in the digital space and haven’t felt safe in other social networking sites whose audiences are not as targeted,” says Salomon.

Doesn't this mean that Condé Nast, the parent of CondeNet and the publishers of Vogue, Glamour, The New Yorker,Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, Wired and many other well-known magazines are getting readers to do their own product placement?

To get the word out about the new site,says Folio:, CondeNet has advertised in Teen Vogue, and launched a direct marketing campaign to Teen Vogue's 96,000 "It Girl" members. Since it launched February 6, more than 4,000 flip books have been created and users have started more than 500 clubs.