ON the blog Mrs. O, fans of Michelle Obama’s style can view photos of the outfit she wore on a recent Tiffany jewelry date with the president-elect and find out where to buy the same purple designer coat.
The advertising agency behind the blog, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, does not work for Mrs. Obama or for the fashion designers the site features. In fact, mrs-o.org is not for a client at all. It is an entirely new business created by the Zag division of Bartle Bogle, which the agency started to invent new brands.
Mrs. O and Zag are part of a business model transformation in the advertising industry. Agencies are parlaying their expertise in marketing the brands of other companies into creating and marketing their own.
“Advertising is a massively old model based on the 1950s. As media has proliferated, it’s become a lot harder for us to earn enough money off our ideas,” said Ben Jenkins, the strategic director of Zag. “Zag is about creating the properties ourselves from scratch and having 100 percent of it.”
Advertising agencies have dabbled in side businesses for decades, but “inventing their own brand, not dependent on clients’ largess, is the big new thing,” said George Parker, an ad agency consultant and writer of AdScam, a blog about the industry. As the economy worsens and ad budgets tighten, “the creation of intellectual property and new products is something you’re going to see a lot more of,” he said.
The ad agency Brooklyn Brothers, for example, makes Fat Pig chocolate and is developing a furniture line. Anomaly has created the Avec Eric television series and Web site, which is the personal blog of chef Eric Ripert, and I/denti/tee, a line of music T-shirts.
Bartle Bogle started Zag in Britain in 2006 and put new emphasis on its United States business this year. It has produced Pick Me, a line of premade vegetarian meals; Ila Dusk, a personal security alarm; and Dogside, a social networking and e-commerce site for dog owners.
Zag got into the fashion blogging business in September, after Mary Tomer, a 27-year-old account planner at Bartle Bogle in New York, hatched the idea for the blog. She noticed Mrs. Obama’s style during the Democratic convention, yet could not find information on what she wore.
She decided to create a Web site, which she described as “a central resource for tracking her style and providing as much designer information and commentary as possible.”
Instead of writing the blog in her spare time after work, like most bloggers with day jobs, she approached her employers to see if they would bankroll her new hobby. They readily agreed.
“Mary was very sure about what she wanted, and when you read about the best brands, they are unrelenting,” Mr. Jenkins said. “That’s what I preached to my clients for the last 10 years, and now we have the chance to do that ourselves.”
The site posts photographs of Mrs. Obama dressed up at public events with her husband and dressed down in yoga pants and snow boots with friends. The writers describe her clothes, shoes and jewelry in vivid detail, drawing historical references to past first ladies and instructing readers where to buy similar pieces.
Mrs. O has made a parlor game out of what Mrs. Obama will wear to the inauguration. It has highlighted her favored Chicago designer, Maria Pinto, whom it compares to Oleg Cassini, a designer made famous by another trendsetting first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy (who later became another Mrs. O when she married Aristotle Onassis).
Describing a photo of Mrs. Obama meeting voters in Iowa during the campaign, Ms. Tomer wrote: “The deep peach hue of Mrs. O’s silk top, softly folded at the neckline, catches the light and jumps from the page.” She compared it to a photograph of Mrs. Kennedy on a boat in India, wearing an apricot silk dress reminiscent of Mrs. Obama’s blouse.
In another entry, the blog praised Mrs. Obama’s creative use of a trio of brooches made by jewelry designer Erickson Beamon. In September, she wore them to pin a cardigan and a month later they appeared atop her pearl necklace at the third presidential debate.
“Mrs. O also knows how to get mileage out of her accessories,” the blog declared. “She’s a master at putting an inspired, fresh spin on the same pieces to make them feel completely brand new.”
Ms. Tomer and the site’s other writers find pictures of Mrs. Obama in newspapers or on the photo Web site Flickr and get permission from the photographers to post the photos free. They research her outfits by calling designers, searching on sites like Style.com and, when stumped, turning to the blog’s readers.
At first, Bartle Bogle thought of the site as an experiment in new media. Quickly, though, “there was a realization that there was a bigger idea here that was a very viable business opportunity,” Ms. Tomer said.
The site had 120,000 readers in November and is already earning revenue from Google AdSense. It has joined Coutorture, a fashion blog network owned by Sugar Inc. that will syndicate Mrs. O content. Reversing the usual ad agency role and selling ad space instead of buying it, the blog will most likely join the ad network SyndiGO, Ms. Tomer said.
Its writers are on the verge of signing a book deal and are producing a T-shirt in time for the inauguration that is inspired by Mrs. Obama’s jewelry and designed by a Bartle Bogle graphic designer, Ms. Tomer said. They plan to soon sell other merchandise, like tote bags. Revenue is shared among the agency and the employees who work on the site.
Bartle Bogle has spent less than $2,000 on the site, not counting the time that at least 14 staff members have put into writing posts, creating the logo and building the Web site. Maintaining the site is now 40 percent of Ms. Tomer’s job.
Bartle Bogle learns lessons from the brands it builds that it applies to its client brands, Mr. Jenkins said.
“They will be able to use Mrs. O to say, ‘Here’s what we did,”‘ Mr. Parker said. “It demonstrates an expertise that’s outside the old parameters of what ad agencies did.”
Still, he said, the site’s creators will have to tread lightly as they try to make money on the site, because audiences want blogs and social networks to be conversation tools, not marketing vessels. “Particularly with the Obama mystique, anything that smacks of commercialism will blow up,” he said.
Mrs. Obama and the Mrs. O blog succeed as brands, Ms. Tomer said, because the soon-to-be first lady’s sartorial choices are thoroughly modern, from her embrace of practical yet fashionable flat shoes to her mix of high-end designer gowns and J. Crew separates.
“On the campaign trail, she’s in skinny jeans and a sweater set, and a few hours later on ‘Larry King Live,’ she’s in this beautiful purple frock with a fantastic feathery brooch,” Ms. Tomer said. “With Michelle Obama, you see the different roles she takes on in her life reflected in her wardrobe. There’s an authenticity, a realness, and people can relate.”