Marie Redding, Senior Editor08.17.23
Beauty marketing is changing fast, due to new tools like CGI technology. Some brands, like Maybelline (a L'Oreal company), are embracing new technology—and creating memorable campaigns.
When Maybelline New York debuted short videos advertising its mascara on July 6th and 7th, they quickly went viral. First, a video for Falsies Surreal Mascara shows a pink train resembling its mascara package gliding down a New York City street. It has 12.7 million views on TikTok and counting.
The next day, another video featuring Sky High Mascara made headlines. It had viewers believe a train in London was "wearing" fake eyelashes—and a giant mascara brush extending out from a billboard coats the lashes as the train pulled into the tube station. In the next clip, a double-decker bus "wearing" lashes gets combed by a giant brush attached to a billboard on a building. The videos exaggerate the flexibility of Maybelline's "Flex Tower" mascara wand applicator, which allows users to easily cover individual lashes from root to tip.
Similar videos are promoting Kylie Cosmetics' debut at the UK retailer Asos. The Drum reports, "The augmented reality (AR) ad depicts a pale pink mascara tube winding its way through a subway station on the London Underground. Pink-mascara-tube-meets-train-in-AR might sound familiar..." Asos posted another video on Instagram @asos showing a giant Kylie Cosmetics lip gloss floating along the River Thames in front of the London Eye.
Kylie's video has everyone watching Maybelline's videos again—racking up even more views.
Maybelline Talks About Its Inspiration
Maybelline's videos use CGI so well that many viewers thought the brand installed fake lashes and super-sized mascara packaging to shoot the videos. The Evening Standard wrote, "Londoners are even plotting to track down the stylish tube carriage and bus so they can see them in real life." A couple of days later, a slew of headlines revealed it was CGI.Maybelline's Lauren Chapman, senior product brand manager at Maybelline, explains she partnered with video creator Ian Padgham to create the campaign after discovering his surreal-art-inspired videos. "We had no idea this would blow up so much," she explains on TikTok @laurenchapman95.
Padgham shows some of his work for Maybelline cut from the final edits on Instagram @origiful, the name of his production company.
The Future of Beauty Marketing
What's next in beauty marketing? More creative ways to use CGI for OOH—Out-of-Home advertising, experts say. Glossy writes, "Welcome to the era of what’s being called faux out-of-home advertising: Hyper-realistic, augmented reality or CGI-based digital ads that appear as real-world, OOH activations."If the popularity of the Barbie movie and our admiration for the visually stunning Barbieland is any indication, it seems that beauty consumers want to be entertained—and the further from reality, the better.
See Maybelline's video below.
