Through our interviews, we discovered that young Singaporean women were highly distrustful of traditional foundation ads, dismissing them as being “fake”. Thus, we set out to find exactly how they defined their dream complexion.

We knew that they love taking selfies, with some spending up to 5 hours a week doing so. However, while looking through their recent selfies, we spotted a trend – most were taken using Snapchat’s iconic ‘Puppy’ and ‘Flower Crown’ filters.

Sensing that we were on to something bigger, we probed deeper and found that their obsession with Snapchat selfies is deeply rooted in the filters’ subtle beautification effects instantly achieve a natural looking, velvety, soft-matte complexion that they love – similar to the finish of Maybelline’s Dream Velvet Foundation.

This sparked our campaign’s big idea – Maybelline’s Dream Velvet Foundation gives you selfie-ready skin in real life, empowering you to be your own filter’.

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.

Objective 1: Raise awareness for product through impactful campaign content

We demonstrated success in accumulating earned media through organic sharing by…

- Reaching 1,096,031 unique audiences (174% above KPIs),

- Achieving 5,789,197 impressions (180% above KPIs),

- Garnering 283,726 completed video views (3.3X above benchmarks),

Objective 2: Drive consideration for purchase via social media engagement

We resonated so strongly with audiences that we sparked their desire to engage…

- Achieving an overall engagement rate of 14.3% (110% above KPIs),

- Delivering an engagement rate of 29.2% on all campaign video content (227% above KPIs),

- Driving 134,151 clicks to website and Facebook page (158% above KPIs).

Objective 3: Increase product sales

Finally, we proved that amazing content has the power to drive sales, by…

- Exceeding set sales targets by 130% within a month of campaign launch, a commendable result considering the product’s novelty.