Singapore is a small, savvy market of consumers notoriously difficult to engage. Our target audience is constantly bombarded by beauty brands on social media and sees up to 600 ads daily, making it a struggle to stand out with new product launches happening regularly.

The greatest challenge for the launch of Maybelline’s new Dream Velvet Foundation was to communicate its trendy and popular soft-matte finish in a way that resonates with our target audience, and stands out from similar competitor merchandise at comparable or lower price points.

Traditional foundation advertising was not going to cut it, as all came with highly similar look and feel, featuring professionally studio-shot and retouched models that would definitely get buried under saturated competitor clutter on social media.

Thus, Maybelline had to find a simple and intriguing way of getting noticed without breaking the bank, given our small budget to run the campaign in Singapore.

To launch the ‘Maybelline's Snapchat Hack’ campaign, we created physical 2D Snapchat filters out of paper, blurring the lines between virtual and reality. We launched our campaign on Facebook and Instagram with a provocative teaser to grab our audiences’ attention by mimicking a Snapchat video, featuring Youtiao666 wearing the filter cut-outs, only to finally disclose that no actual Snapchat beautifying filters were used.

Following this, we revealed a ‘behind-the-scenes’ video showing the two girls putting on Maybelline’s Dream Velvet Foundation prior to the teaser filming, driving home the message that the only ‘filter’ needed for a flawless, Snapchat-filtered complexion is our product.

Once we got audiences talking, we wanted to keep them engaged by hosting Facebook contests. By leveraging Facebook’s new Reactions feature, we got our audience to choose between two photos of Youtiao666, one that was digitally filtered and the other only wearing the Foundation with cut-out paper filters.