This was our TikTok debut directed at the platform’s make-up and beauty audience.

It made use of a celebrity who had influence both in mass media and on socials.

Moreover we made use of social behavior, language and video trends to engage our audience.

The campaign successfully went viral on social and in the press to reach Martha’s fans across generations.

The sentiment was strongly centered around Martha’s fun side shining through (not always seen), and that the #ads didn’t come off like ads, but like the platform native entertainment driven commentary that users love.

Clé de Peau Beauté is a luxury beauty brand.

We wanted to appeal to a younger generation and that meant reaching them when and where they go for beauty tips and inspiration: TikTok and Instagram.

But how do you get millennials to stop scrolling and buy a $75 Concealer?

To launch our daring campaign, we knew there was only one person to work with, someone with influence who could turn heads – Martha Stewart.

She's been a long-time fan of Clé de Peau Beauté, and was the perfect partner for our brand’s TikTok debut to:

-Make waves on social and beyond.

-Build brand awareness and consideration.

-Promote selected prestige products.

-Drive consumers to our site.

Last summer, her selfie had the Internet cheering and calling it a Thirst Trap: a sexy photograph or flirty message posted on social media for the intent of causing others to publicly profess their attraction.

Idea: reveal our brand & products as Martha's secret to her 'thirst trap' selfie.

Younger audiences are likely to use luxury products when they’re used and trusted by an icon like Martha Stewart.

Especially since she was ready to lean into the ‘thirst trap’ moniker from her infamous selfie.

The juxtaposition of a high-end beauty brand on a fun, young platform was ripe for humor.

In our content, we would speak to the audience using the social behavior of beauty influencers but surprise them by having the queen of unexpected turns perform them.

The tricky thing would be to do it all and debut the brand’s TikTok presence with authenticity - first impressions are everything in the beauty world.

GenZ focus groups and rounds of script revisions, fine tuned the delivery.

Our nuanced approach combined Martha’s universal appeal, trendy-but-effortlessly-cool TikTok poses and cheeky humor.

First impressions last and our launch campaign would set the mood amongst our younger audience for the future, so we created this suite of assets with TikTok being top of mind.

With Martha posting the content exclusively on her personal social handles it was first humorous, then iconic and most importantly, influential. That made the Martha landing page on Cledepeaubeaute.com look like it was capitalizing on the #tiktokmademebuyit trend.

We worked to surface popular but not fleeting trends on social and in particular, TikTok, to incorporate into our videos.

To further our reach potential we decided to lean into Instagram Reels, rather than posting the videos in feed. The success of this asset distribution strategy was a key player in the performance of the assets in addition to the creative approach.

Which all made for entertaining content that followers and the press couldn’t resist.

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.

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.

The campaign was our best performing social and marketing campaign for the US market.

Our campaign proved successful on social media with the first video garnering over 5 million views in the first 5 days (over 1.8 million organic).

In total, across all content, we exceeded 78 million views on TikTok and Instagram.

Beyond the platforms we sparked 43 press articles (including in the New York Times) and over 3 BILLION impressions.

Total Press Impressions: 3,255,991,333.

21.6% YTD Press Placements.

52.2% YTD Press Impressions.

Best of all in February 2022, Clé de Peau Beauté’s Concealer was our #1 product across all the entire business.

The campaign beat brand lift beauty category benchmarks by 222% (Kantar).

Clé de Peau Beauté outpaced the total prestige makeup market in sales growth by +10ppts.

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 Martha Stewart landing page was our top viewed landing page of all time on cledepeaubeaute.com

Martha’s personal handle also gained 200K new followers during the campaign’s run time.

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 recognisable 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.