Maybelline’s Through Their Eyes was a compelling piece of content built off a shocking, and illuminating insight - that women who play games online often hide their identities to avoid harassment. Maybelline has been active in the social responsibility space before, through their platform “Brave Together”, an initiative to support people experiencing anxiety and depression. Activating in the gaming space could have been seen as a disingenuous grab at a younger market, but by anchoring our approach in a rich insight, and connecting it strategically with Maybelline’s brand purpose, we started a crucial conversation to help change the game for

Maybelline is well and truly the leader in Australian cosmetics, with an impressive market share and the #1 selling mascara products in the country. However, its brand health has been slowly declining with a younger audience (down 12.7% since 2020), as newer entrants touting DTC models, cheaper products and highly social profiles have been capturing the hearts, minds and wallets of the next generation. Maybelline knew it had to do something to defend its brand equity in this space, and looked towards gaming as a potential unexplored frontier to activate and grow relevance. 46% of gamers in Australia identify as female, with a strong overlap with the under 35 demographic that Maybelline needed to strengthen brand equity in.

Our objective was therefore to grow brand equity with the under 35 demographic, and to activate in the gaming space in a way that felt genuine and aligned to the brand.

Maybelline is well and truly the leader in Australian cosmetics, with an impressive market share and the #1 selling mascara products in the country. However, its brand health has been slowly declining with a younger audience, as newer entrants touting DTC models, cheaper products and highly social profiles have been capturing the hearts, minds and wallets of the next generation. Maybelline’s brand equity, as measured by Kantar’s Power Score index, had decreased 12.7% with the target market since 2020, and this has had a direct impact on sales. Maybelline knew it had to do something to defend its brand equity in this space from further erosion, and looked towards gaming as a potential unexplored frontier to activate and grow relevance. 46% of gamers in Australia identify as women, with a strong overlap with the U35 demographic that Maybelline needed to strengthen brand equity in.

In Australia most cosmetics are sold through big-box discount pharmacies or supermarkets, which heavily discount. Therefore many purchase decisions are made based on what’s on sale. In order to increase price elasticity and defend against switching, the decision was made to focus on brand metrics in order to strengthen our market position. Although other competitors could copy our products, they couldn’t copy our brand, so we sought to strengthen the crucial metric of ‘meaningful’ by activating in a more socially driven, purpose-led way.

Maybelline’s brand struggle with under 35s was anchored in a reduction of 12.7% since 2020 in its Kantar Brand Power score - a combination of meaningfulness, differentiation and salience that is a proven predictor of market share. Cheaper competitors were flocking to the market, with ‘me-too’ copy products and playful social presences that were eroding Maybelline’s dominance. Differentiation based on product or quality messages was not going to work to strengthen equity, and the salience of the brand was miles ahead of its competitors. Therefore the strategic decision was made to strengthen the meaningful pillar of our equity score. Maybelline’s purpose is to give everyone the confidence to express themselves, to play and to create. Whilst other brands could copy our products, they couldn’t copy our brand, and so to grow our “meaningful” score the decision was made to bring to life the brand purpose in the gaming space.

The worlds of makeup and gaming don’t naturally intersect, and as such we started with a deep dive into understanding the lives of female gamers, to discover where we could play a meaningful role.

We commissioned research with a panel of more than 1000 gamers, and discovered that the experience of female identifying gamers was often fraught with abuse and harassment.

In particular, one statistic stood out. Whilst 83% of females had experienced abuse or harassment whilst playing games online, a staggering 90% had modified their behaviour by turning off their cameras or shutting down their voice commands in order to feel safe.

This felt like a significant strategic point of tension. For a brand whose purpose is all about giving people the confidence to express themselves and to play, how could we stand by and say nothing when our consumers were hiding themselves away to feel safe?

Our approach was to launch “Through Their Eyes”, a thought provoking social experiment that showed male gamers what it was like to play through a woman’s eyes. Two Australian male gaming influencers had their real identities disguised with voice modification software and fake female profiles in an online first-person shooter. They experienced first-hand the terrible abuse and bullying experienced by female-identifying gamers.

The film strongly resonated with the online gaming community and beyond. Appreciating they’d been heard, female-identifying players shared the campaign along with their stories, many who had been hiding in silence, and millions of gamers, male and female alike, called for others to stand up and say something.

The creative strategy directly influenced the content - by focusing on the insight that female-identifying gamers hid themselves away, we were able to fully bring to life their experience and shine a light on the double standards within the environment.

The meaningful brand metric increased 18% in our target audience of U35s. Brand health lifted by 12.1%, restoring it to levels not seen since 2020.

The campaign achieved 449.9M global impressions and an earned media reach of 276.5M+. It was featured in over 100 global publications, 29 being international gaming news outlets, achieving earned media reach of 65.2M+ gamers.

Research conducted in late 2023 showed a drop in abuse experienced from 83% to 74% in the female identifying community, with 1 in 10 gamers recalling the campaign unprompted a year after its release.

Maybelline achieved their highest ever market share the month of the campaign (51.93%), outpacing the market by 5x in unit sales, with +19.7% of market penetration YOY. This represented a ROI of 3.43.

It was one of three campaigns featured in the Insight & Strategy section of Contagious Quarterly (Q2/23).

Maybelline New York believes that everyone should feel free to express themselves, to play and to create. However, the online gaming world is one place where some can’t. Due to the abuse faced by female identifying gamers many hide their identities and play in silence, or not at all. This reality contradicted every aspect of Maybelline’s brand purpose.

To truly live our brand purpose we needed to attempt to change the game for good, and create safer spaces for everyone to express themselves and play.

This quote from influential Australian gamer Phos sums up our reasoning:

“I am sick and tired of bullying and discrimination being not only being tolerated but accepted in the hobby that I love, I am tired of being seen as less than because of my gender … so I cannot thank Maybelline enough for this campaign, thank you so much for getting involved”.