Music Videos -- Retailers Are Moving To The Beat Of This Latest Marketing Tool

Orange neon glows. Golden beams and fluorescent lights play amid mini-skirts, polka-dotted blouses, hot-pink T-shirts.

The torrid music of Martika, the Nation's Funktasia, Pet Shop Boys and M.C. Mikee Freedom fills the air. The beat is fast and hip.

TV monitors flash images of young men and women clad in skin-tight jeans, dancing furiously. A new image flashes across the screen every few seconds: flashing neon graphics, romantic landscape scenes, singers with sensual lacquered lips and orange hair moussed to New Wave perfection.

Is this Spinnaker's? Sharkey's at Shilshole Bay? Another hot Seattle nightclub?

Try again.

It's the Brass Plum shop at Nordstrom.

As shoppers watch their favorite stars perform, they flip through racks of T-shirts and dresses. Sales clerks mingle with the crowd, encouraging some to try on clothes, asking others if they're ready to buy.

This is music video, retail style.

It started out as entertainment for teenage shoppers, and grew into a tool for boosting retail sales. In some circles, it's now being viewed as a hot new way for advertisers to reach these young consumers.

"It's the old nightclub concept," says Michael DuKane, an ex-disco record-burning deejay who is credited for spreading the in-store video craze through his company, Seattle-based Sight & Sound Television Network.

"If no one's dancing, the place looks dead. But put in video, and you have movement, life. Pretty soon, the shoppers come in."

In the past six years, Sight & Sound has installed nearly 4,000 music-video systems in retail stores across the country, and had gross sales last year of $6.5 million.

Teens tend to shop in pairs, a study by DuKane's company found.

One of the two will plan to buy; the other browses. Browsers usually get bored quickly and urge their friends to hurry up. Watching music videos tend to keep the browsers entertained a little longer.

It's hard to tell how much the videos directly contribute to increased sales. But when Sight & Sound measured such things as foot traffic and sales activity and interviewed shoppers, it found that shoppers tended to stay in stores longer when they had the TV screens. Retailers believe the more time that shoppers stay in stores the more likely they are to buy.

In the past five years, more and more retailers have turned their junior departments into quasi-dance clubs in hopes of luring teenage shoppers.

Some specialty shops, such as The Zebra Club, use video to enhance an already hip, anti-establishment look that 13- to 21-year-olds find appealing.

But music video is actually finding bigger retailers - Nordstrom and The Bon Marche, among them - to be its more devoted fans.

The reason why is simple.

"The junior business is an important business, but it has not traditionally been department-store business," says John Buller, vice president of marketing and advertising for The Bon Marche.

"Music video is one way to make their part of our store more conducive to their tastes."

At the downtown Bon's Cube shop for teenage girls, video monitors, mixed with pink neon lights, surround a plaster statue resembling Venus, the Greek goddess symbolizing beauty.

Across the aisle, in the Tiger shop for teenage boys, cotton slacks and Generra shirts were on display amid splashes of neon. Two shoppers fingered a pair of jeans as they watched the Nation's Funktasia perform on one of several video screens.

When Downtown Julie Brown, an MTV hostess, recently made a guest appearance at Nordstrom's Paramus, N.J., store, teenage fans jammed the aisles.

But back in 1984 when Gail Cottle, a Nordstrom vice president and Brass Plum merchandise manager, first proposed bringing music video to Brass Plum, Nordstrom executives raised their eyebrows.

"They challenged the idea, at first," Cottle recalls. " `Was this a fad?' they asked. `Are you sure video's here to stay?'

"Those were legitimate questions," she says. "So much of that teen market is a fad. One day they want pink; the next day pink is out."

Cottle, believing video was the newest way of expressing the music that appeals to teens, persisted.

Today, she says, "It's been a great tool."

She is particularly proud of the "video wall" Nordstrom first built in its Southcenter store in the late 1980s and has incorporated into most of its newer stores. The "wall" consists of 16 TV monitors that flash rock-music performances behind the Brass Plum cash registers.

Sight & Sound supplies retailers with a monthly reel that includes four hours of video from the latest teen stars.

Retailers pay about $4,000 for equipment per store department, and an additional $100 to $150 for a new monthly tape.

They can subscribe to one of four series of tapes - SPIN, which appeals to teenage males, NOW, for teenage females, MAX, for 7- to 12-year-olds, and FIT, a tape that features sports activities.

DuKane's interest in video came in the early 1980s when he was working as a deejay at a North Seattle nightclub. His skills attracted interest from other clubs, and in 1981, Westin Hotel managers approached DuKane about opening a new nightclub.

There was only one catch: the Westin wanted a "veejay," rather than a "deejay."

"They wanted me to prepare a tape of music video that could be played in a nightclub," DuKane recalls. "To me, it sounded pretty weird."

Some weeks later, he flipped on the TV at 4 a.m. and happened to catch the J. Geils Band performing "Centerfold" in video.

"I just stared at the TV and I couldn't believe it," he says. "I could see some real entertainment, a totally new form of expressing music."

DuKane obtained samples of video performances and put together a video reel, which he presented to the Westin. Over the next two years, he prepared similar tapes for clubs throughout Seattle.

He broke into the retail business after Nordstrom's Cottle contacted him. His clients now include such retailers as Nordstrom, The Bon, Frederick & Nelson, Sears and J.C. Penney.

That kind of a client list means about 150 million shoppers catch Sight & Sound's videos in an average year, DuKane says, and with such a high penetration, he is hoping to sell businesses on the idea of using music video to advertise.

His company's advice is simple: "If you want your advertising to be more successful, run your commercials when your prospects aren't home."

The idea is in its infancy, but if the plan works, ads would flash across the video monitors every six minutes.

Already, retailers can use the videotapes to run brief ads, spotlighting the name of their junior shop or a particular item that's on sale.

Dukane hopes to sell ads to companies who sell items in the store as well as to soft-drink companies and movie theaters, who consider teens big consumers of their products.

"Teens are the audience that advertisers have the most difficulty communicating with," says Ed Backolm, vice president of retail advertising for Sight & Sound.

"We've got a way to reach them in an environment where they're in the mood to buy."

Some companies - including Union Bay Sportswear, Levi Strauss, NBC Television and Paramount Pictures - have bought advertising on the network.

But the idea of using in-store video as an advertising vehicle leaves some skeptical.

For one thing, buying ads on Sight & Sound's in-store network is expensive, and there's no guarantee that only teens would see the ads.

DuKane says advertisers buy packages tailored to a specific retail chain. A 30-second spot can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $17,000, depending on the number of shoppers that pass through the retailer's stores.

The cost per 1,000 viewers would be only $2.50, but after taking out parents, younger siblings and other non-teenagers who happen to glimpse the video, the cost per thousand rises to $12 to $15 per 1,000, DuKane says.

Aside from cost, some question whether advertising products such as soft drinks in a department focused on apparel would work.

"Teens are mobile; they're like quicksilver," says Dick Harvey, a Seattle marketing consultant.

"If the product is in the store and the ad tells them where to find it, I can see this working. But if it's something like Pepsi or a shoe that the store doesn't carry, it's got problems."

Retailers can decide whether they want the ads to run or not. If they choose the ads, their subscription fees to the music-video programs will be reduced, DuKane says.

The Bon's Buller said the retailer is planning to use advertising.

"We're talking about a very niched consumer that's difficult to get to in most other ways," Buller says.

However, Cottle, who says Nordstrom is considering accepting advertising as well, points out that they will have to choose ads carefully.

"Our No. 1 interest is to provide entertainment," she says. "If the advertising relates to the customer, fine. But we don't want to offend them, turn them off."