Key Takeaways:
- Beauty brands turned romance and chemistry into campaign currency.
- Off Campus stars became beauty’s newest marketing power players.
- Humor, community, and rule-breaking drove social-first brand storytelling.
Beauty marketing got particularly entertaining in July. Brands leaned into pop culture, humor, and internet fandom, increasingly treating campaigns less like traditional advertising and more like content consumers might actually choose to watch.
Off Campus emerged as a new beauty marketing pipeline, with Rare Beauty, Urban Decay, and TRESemmé tapping breakout stars Ella Bright, Mika Abdalla, and Belmont Cameli, respectively, while Fenty Skin put Rihanna and A$AP Rocky's chemistry at the center of its latest SPF push.
Elsewhere, Mando turned product testing into a deliberately outrageous social stunt with Bert Kreischer, and Welltayl looked to '90s infomercials and Howie Mandel to make pet skincare entertaining. But celebrity wasn't the only route to relevance: Neutrogena used social listening to inform its new global positioning, Good Dye Young put its own community at the heart of its 10th-anniversary campaign, and Celimax tied creator selection more closely to retail performance. Across the board, July's launches reflected a marketing landscape where cultural relevance, community, and entertainment value are becoming just as important as reach.
Neutrogena has launched "Break the Rules," a new global brand mission designed to reposition the heritage skincare brand around dermatologist-backed science and consumer-first innovation. Starting with a campaign for Rapid Wrinkle Repair Retinol Regenerating Cream, the initiative was informed by social listening...
