Even for the most social-savvy marketers, predicting which social media posts will balloon into sweeping pop culture moments is nearly impossible. Josh Cellars, for instance, couldn’t have foreseen that a flurry of memes about its wine would suddenly take over social media earlier this year—or the boost in Gen Z sales that the trend would bring.

But when Gabe Gomez, head of social at MCoBeauty, stumbled across an X post in October featuring a flyer for a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest, he could see the potential for a viral moment—one that the Australian beauty brand, which develops “dupes” of viral luxury makeup and skincare products such as Charlotte Tilbury’s $49 “Hollywood Flawless Filter” foundation, could join with a “Timothée Chalamet dupe” of its own. 

“There were so many signals—like, just the amount of engagement and replies it got,” Gomez told Ad Age. The original X post featuring the flyer racked up over four million likes and was soon followed by a slew of posts about the upcoming competition, including a photo of the actor himself walking past one of the flyers. “That was kind of a firestarter moment where people were like, ‘No way, he saw it—he’s definitely going to be there,’” Gomez added. 

When Chalamet did crash the Oct. 27 look-alike contest in New York City, causing it to quickly erupt into a pop culture phenomenon, Gomez’s foresight meant MCoBeauty was one of two brands present at the competition, with the other being the event sponsor, planning app Partiful.

“I don’t think anyone expected it to be as big of a moment as it was,” he said. “But you could see the conversation start to sort of take shape, and it was a bit of like, ‘Let’s show up and see what happens for us.’ And it ended up being one of the most-talked-about things on social media.”

Building American brand awareness

When Gomez sent the viral X post of the contest flyer to Meridith Rojas, chief marketing officer of MCoBeauty's parent company VidaCorp, about two weeks before the event, she immediately agreed the brand needed to “make something happen.” 

Gomez, Rojas and the rest of the brand’s marketing team ultimately decided to show up at the competition with an MCoBeauty-sponsored Chalamet look-alike—a follow-up to the “Sabrina Carpenter dupe” the brand recruited for a stunt tied to the real Sabrina Carpenter’s two New York concerts in late September. For that campaign, the team partnered with beauty creator Sofia Divene, who often mirrors Carpenter’s style of clothing and makeup in her social content, and paraded her around the city with a pink MCoBeauty bag hanging from her arm. 

When people approached Divene thinking she was Carpenter, Divene introduced herself by her real name and handed out one of the brand’s mascara products. 

In the days leading up to the Timothée Chalamet contest, Gomez scoured social media for the perfect Chalamet doppelganger. He came across Cramer Ekholm, a TikTok creator whose resemblance to the actor had helped him amass an audience of over 255,000. Ekholm had recently posted a video lamenting that he wouldn’t be able to travel the 1,000 miles from his home in Wisconsin to the New York contest. 

Gomez commented “thinking…” from the MCoBeauty account on that video, leading Ekholm to reply with a video with on-screen text reading, “Are we thinking the same thing right now? ✈️.” Within 24 hours, MCoBeauty’s team was on the phone with Ekholm—and just a few days later, they had signed Ekholm’s first brand deal and put him on a plane to New York, Gomez said. 

The collaboration “was a fun way for us to introduce the brand” to consumers unfamiliar with MCoBeauty, Gomez said. The brand, launched in 2020, only recently expanded from Australia to the U.S. through a partnership with Kroger earlier this year. And although it’s “Australia’s fastest-growing beauty brand,” according to the Kroger press release, and draws an average of over 50 million TikTok views per month, brand awareness is still relatively low in the U.S. among consumers outside of the TikTok beauty community, Rojas said. 

Activating at the look-alike contest was part of the brand’s efforts to reach a broader Gen Z audience united by entertainment and pop culture rather than just makeup, she added. Most of the consumers who interacted with the MCoBeauty team and their Chalamet look-alike at the contest were “probably meeting us for the first time,” she said. 

“Part of our mission is to go places that are unexpected because if you’re going to a beauty event, you might blend in—but if you're going to a look-alike content, you may very well stand out,” Rojas said. Indeed, both consumers and entertainment news outlets such as Variety and Us Weekly “immediately flocked” to Ekholm when he arrived at the competition, Gomez said. “And it was great because he was carrying around our MCoBeauty bag and giving out our contour wands.” 

At the Chalamet competition, where over 2,000 attendees wedged into Washington Square Park, Ekholm interviewed roughly 20 people about their makeup routines, whether they would want “cheekbones as snatched as Timothée’s” and their thoughts on who would win the look-alike contest with a $50 prize. He also handed out “a few hundred” of the brand’s contour wands—the product the MCoBeauty team had used to highlight Ekholm’s cheekbones (and give him a “Timothée-certified jawline,” according to the brand’s Instagram caption) ahead of the contest, Rojas said.

Participating in pop culture moments is a crucial strategy for marketers seeking to build relevance with Gen Z consumers. A recent report from YPulse, a youth market research firm, found 77% of 13-to-39-year-old consumers want to see brands launch marketing activations that connect to pop culture moments. 

Rather than trying to force a marketing campaign to become a pop culture phenomenon, “smart brands aren’t trying to create culture—they show up and they’re adjacent to culture, and they get a halo effect by knowing when and where to plug themselves in,” Rojas said. “And I think this is a critical piece of how we’re thinking about growing MCo in the U.S.” 

Ekholm may not have won the Chalamet look-alike contest, but the top comment on his MCoBeauty-sponsored TikTok video declares he should have been the winner, Gomez said. “So, I like to say we were the ‘people’s choice’ Timothée Chalamet dupe.”