Brief
Challenge: Clé de Peau Beauté, a premium beauty brand, set out to expand our devout following and introduce our products to a new generation, meeting them where they go for beauty tips and inspiration: TikTok and Instagram.
American icon and devoted fan, Martha Stewart, was the perfect partner for our TikTok debut.
Her enduring appeal, better than anyone, captures the message that it’s possible to achieve Generation Ageless.
We needed to promote our prestige products, drive users to the site and make waves on social and beyond.
The juxtaposition of a classic brand on a fun, young platform was ripe for humor. Having famous friends makes Martha a rare cultural tastemaker across generations.
Idea: reveal the brand & products as Martha’s secret to her infamous ‘thirst trap’ selfie. We worked closely with Martha to create five videos all in the style and language of TikTok.
Strategy
Our TikTok videos had to look native to the platform but still perform like ads.
We leaned into Martha’s genuine passion for the products and her engaging personality, tongue-in-cheek humor and exquisite taste.
TikTok can be a tricky platform to navigate. Users are quick to mock inauthentic, un-relatable content.
First impressions last and our campaign would set the mood amongst the multi-generational TikTok audience.
A Gen-Z focus group ensured our script wouldn’t make Martha come off as trying to be a ‘cool mom’, but rather her beloved self as a badass aunty.
Martha had already set the tone with her ‘thirst trap’ selfie the previous summer, so we needed to incorporate the social trends of how-to beauty tutorials, lifestyle guides and the choreography & body language that’s native to the platform.
With Martha executing them it was first humorous, then iconic and lastly, influential
Solution
Creative Execution:
We created five entertaining videos. They couldn’t be too trendy so as to be forgotten in a week but they had to resonate with major moods in the beauty space.
Our first video wowed the world with Martha’s acknowledgement and ownership of the Thirst Trap title and explained how she achieved it with some help from Clé de Peau.
The following four videos featured different products and played on Martha’s newfound status as a classy, desirable TikTok influencer, able to hold her own and outshine any other beauty tutorialist.
Each online sub-culture has its own trends and language. We delved into the world of beauty and make-up influencers to identify social behavior that was instantly recognizable but also likely to last long enough to stay relevant for our campaign.
The community gave us our first one when they branded Martha’s sultry selfie a ‘thirst trap.’
We incorporated more language from beauty and youth culture like, ‘spilling the tea’, and ‘living’ for something.
We baked in some common video effects (with added class) like smooth transitions, ASMR, dazzling backgrounds and the clone trail effect. These spoke the non-verbal language our audience was tuned into.
We leaned into the term, ‘Aunty, that Gen-Z is using to describe 40+ women who are aspirational, cultured and living inclusive and vivacious lives. They are often forgotten in mainstream media and we love this refreshing obsession with fabulous middle-aged women that Gen-Z respects and trusts.
Our stealthy approach camouflaged all the advertising best practices by using in-app features like the Jessie VO feature, adding Clé de Peau as the secret phrase to get the perfect thirst trap photo, using the brand name in the Cover Thumbnail, and creating a custom animated logo in the VFX background.
Results
The campaign was our best performing social and marketing campaign for the US market.
This campaign proved successful on social media with the first video garnering over 5 million views in the first 5 days.
In total, across all content, we exceeded 78 million views on TikTok and Instagram.
The campaign beat brand lift beauty category benchmarks by 222% (Kantar).
Beyond the platforms we sparked 43 press articles, 3+ billion impressions and, in February 2022, Clé de Peau Beauté’s Concealer was our #1 selling product.
We outpaced the total prestige makeup market in sales growth by +10ppts. 3 of 4 Across the total business (skincare and makeup), Clé de Peau Beauté outpaced the total prestige beauty market in sales growth by +3ppts. (Source: NPD)
Our campaign page was the top viewed landing page of all time on cledepeaubeaute.com
