The Campaign

Branded web content was, and still is at a very nascent stage in India. Though the web audience is consuming content more than ever, there exist very few branded entertainment/ content destinations online. With BeBeautiful, Unilever had in 2011, developed a mass consumer engagement platform, straddling the personal care and beauty brands from the Unilever portfolio including Ponds, Vaseline, Lakme and Dove. The platform took the brands’ equity a touch above traditional ‘push’ vanilla advertising with DIY videos, celebrity fashion decoding, showcasing latest trends to give a holistic beauty experience to its users.

Results

The Challenge Having created an award-winning mass consumer engagement platform in BeBeautiful.in, it was time for Unilever’s beauty brands to take a leap to a more credible yet relatively unchartered territory – Video Blogging. However, producing hundreds of branded content videos would prove to be an expensive affair. The challenge was, therefore, to provide Unilever with content from key opinion formers and evolved netizens (The Bloggers), in a cost effective manner. The Solution We saw that globally, several beauty YouTube stars like MacBarbie07; Candy Johnson have million strong fan followings. One such beauty blogger, Michelle Phan has grown so popular, she now has a makeup range to her credit. This popularity opens up many avenues for these young fashionistas – especially to make some serious bucks by monetizing their content on YouTube. Indian beauty bloggers, on the other hand had still not embraced the wave of Vlogging (Video Blogging). Unilever saw an opportunity to bring together the next wave of bloggers, on a single –unified platform by simply empowering them with the know-how and opening the door of endless possibilities for them. Partnering with Google and other industry mavens, BeBeautiful conducted a Video MasterClass with the bloggers. From fun, engaging sessions with fashion and make-up experts to enriching sessions with technical specialists on the craft of filmmaking and editing, the MasterClass gave the bloggers every reason to go the video way. The win-win situation? By supporting them with expert domain knowledge and technical know-how on to shoot and edit video blogs for themselves; the Vloggers were expected to give us Vlogs in return. Handpicked Vlogs featuring Unilever beauty brands were then broadcast on the BeBeautiful YT channel. In return, the bloggers got the limelight on them from India’s largest beauty broadcaster.

Young urban Indian women between the ages of 18 and 34 were already searching for how-to content on beauty, with over half of them consuming the content in the video format. Through search, display and pre-roll ads we ensured that they discovered the content on the BeBeautiful VLOG ON YouTube page. Content was cross-pollinated in the BeBeautiful ecosystem on social, the website and YouTube.

As of today, the BeBeautiful YouTube channel has over 31,000 subscribers and 11 million views. Through Vlog-On, HUL beauty brands got endorsement from the most influential beauty and fashion bloggers in India. Today, BeBeautiful VlogOn is the single largest beauty destination with video content in India surpassing the combined digital reach of all competing brands.