Young women are increasingly turning to social media for beauty inspiration, paying more attention to influencers than brands when it comes to experimenting with new looks and buying new products. As a result, many purchases are being made directly from social sites, without consumers ever trying on what they bought. Macy’s needed a way to grab their customers’ attention within the sea of social content, while also providing them with a quick, simple way to see what beauty products would look best on them without ever entering a store.

Facebook has a new 3D photo feature, which adds depth and movement to photos from a dual-lens smartphone. These new photos move when you tilt your phone, the foreground moving more than the background, to create parallax. Macy’s hacked this feature to turn a normal photo into an interactive beauty experience. Facebook creates 3D photos by inspecting a “depth map” stored within the photo, which indicates how the photo is oriented in 3D space. Macy’s made a normal photo interactive by giving it a custom depth map. The result was a 3D photo which shows how different beauty products look on someone simply by tilting your phone. The photo consists of different makeup styles floating over a face. Moving your phone in different directions lines up each look with the face, providing you with an easy way to visualize drastically different looks and buy your favorite.

The Macy’s target audience consists of women between 18- and 39-years-old. These women see Macy’s as a familiar name, but not as the number one beauty authority, especially when it comes to more cutting-edge looks for younger women. They look to social media sites as their primary source of inspiration for new looks, in particular beauty tutorials that highlight one look at a time. We needed to create a beauty campaign that would prevent people from scrolling right past, while also allowing them to discover a variety of looks in as short a time as possible. No brand had used the Facebook 3D Photo function in such a way, so it was a prime candidate for disrupting the feed and giving the Macy’s audience a quick and helpful tool to find their unique look.

To help young women find the look that is right for them, we created GLAMM3D UP to help them easily compare a wide variety of products. If users were looking for the right lipstick to buy, they could use the 3D photo to see how four different colors would work for their skin tone, each color bolder than the next. As people scrolled past the post, the makeup would move on its own within the photo, catching people’s eyes and stopping them from scrolling past. After finding the right shade of makeup, people could follow a link to a curated e-commerce site, where they could easily purchase the products they experimented with. And the posts were all organic, costing Macy’s $0 to post.

• The posts were organically shared on Facebook 333% more than the average Macy’s post.

• Beauty product sales were up 718% compared to the following week.

• Visits to the Macy’s beauty e-commerce site were up 345% compared to the following week.

• GLAMM3D UP contributed to Macy’s having its first annual sales growth in four years.