The Campaign

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’.

The Brief

The A&P budgets for product launches in Singapore are usually small as many a times, the brand is expected to work with toolkits that their global office provide; most of which are not the most relevant to the domestic market as the comms are targeted to a different age group in Singapore. Our challenge was to work with the current budget and come up with something that could resonate with the intended target market. Overall budget: SGD56,000. Strategy, Creative Development and Production: SGD30,000 Paid Media: SGD26,000

Creative Execution

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.

Results

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.

Despite having a small budget, being able to tap into a strong consumer insight helped us to achieve high impact, driven by high engagement and organic sharing of our content. Our campaign videos achieved an unprecedented engagement rate of 29.2%, exceeding benchmarks by 227%. Most importantly, we also successfully exceeded sales target by 130% within one month of campaign launch despite our budget constraints. Furthermore, from being number three, Maybelline rose to become number one in terms of overall Foundations product sales among mass-market cosmetic brands in Singapore, with an impressive 156% lift in brand market share.

Rather than conventional celebrity-focused advertising, our target audience of Singaporean women age 15-25 turns to social media when consuming beauty-related content. In particular, they seek opinions from beauty influencers in the social media space as relatable and valid sources of information they know they can trust. Thus, we reached out to up-and-coming local influencers Youtiao666 to launch the campaign. Unlike other beauty influencers, the duo behind Youtiao666 is especially popular amongst young Singaporean women due to their undeniably humorous and quirky personalities. Well known for ‘keeping it real’, the duo had high credibility amongst our savvy target audience. The campaign ran primarily on social media, which includes Maybelline’s official Facebook page and Youtiao666’s Instagram account, allowing us to tap organically into our influencers’ large base of followers. All content on social media ultimately directed audiences to Maybelline Singapore’s website where consumers can learn more about the product.