BeReal is launching its first marketing campaign a year after the platform took the social media world by storm with its lack of filters. 

“The Realest Person on Earth” comes as the so-called anti-Instagram app has waned in popularity in the U.S. following its surge to virality in the second half of 2022. The campaign kicks off with a global competition to determine the “realest” BeReal post—or, as a blog post detailing the contest describes it, the “wildest, rawest, most embarrassing, unhinged BeReal.” 

“Make us laugh, cry, cry from laughter, or just stop us dead in our tracks and you could win the (crown emoji),” the post continues. The BeReal team will narrow the contest submissions down to 50 finalists, whose posts will then be voted on across BeReal’s Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok accounts to determine the so-called “Realest Person on Earth.” That winner will be unveiled on Nov. 22, and they and their post will appear on several billboards in cities around the world, including New York.

“We’ve been thinking about all sorts of crazy and fun brand marketing stunts since [the marketing team] started, which was late 2021,” Julian Hislop, head of field marketing strategy at BeReal, told Ad Age. “The reason why we ended up going for a contest is because we wanted to create an organic way of involving our community while also rewarding them as much as possible.”

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Beyond appearing on a billboard, the grand prize winner will also receive a weeklong paid vacation for four people to any location. The four finalists in the competition will each be awarded $5,000 and be given the power to set the BeReal time—the two-minute window when the platform alerts users to take a photo using both their phone’s front and back cameras goes off—for a single day. All entrants must meet their country’s legal age requirement to participate in such contests, and those under 18 must have a parent or guardian’s consent in countries where necessary. 

BeReal’s internal marketing team of six people put “The Realest Person on Earth” campaign together in three months, Hislop said. That team has remained small since launching in 2021 due to BeReal’s lack of focus on marketing, but the marketing team will begin to expand moving forward as BeReal begins to launch “regular marketing campaigns,” he said. 

The campaign comes as the app “hasn’t cracked the top downloads list in a while,” said Lia Haberman, a brand advisor who teaches social and influencer marketing at UCLA, in an email. “Plus, TikTok discontinued its BeReal clone, TikTok Now, and we haven’t heard a peep about Instagram’s Roll Call, which was supposed to let you send photos or videos to [a] group chat within a five-minute window. The whole time-sensitive photo swap [concept] just seemed to drop off the radar.”

But Haberman also said that BeReal has maintained some of its popularity among pre-teens and teens—as well as their parents. In the comments section of a recent post in Peloton’s official “Mom Group” on Facebook, which Haberman said she joined to “get a pulse on what mainstream middle America moms talk about,” a number of moms who said they heavily restrict their teenagers’ social media use praised BeReal for being more “harmless” and “innocent” than other platforms.  

BeReal’s popularity has dipped in the U.S. throughout 2023, steadily declining from nearly 4 million monthly active users in November 2022 to just over 3 million in August 2023, according to Similarweb. Worldwide, the platform has hovered at around 20 million monthly active Android users for the past year, per Similarweb. 

BeReal said it has 25 million daily active users around the globe, and its userbase is “the highest it’s been,” Hislop said. The platform declined to share metrics for specific markets such as the U.S.

Though BeReal was first released in France in 2020, the platform only began gaining traction in other parts of the world in mid-2022. People—particularly Gen Z and millennials—flocked to the app for its emphasis on authenticity and the relatively small social circle its model fostered. BeReal took the U.S. by storm in the second half of 2022, briefly climbing to the top spot on Apple’s app store in July and receiving millions of monthly downloads, according to SensorTower data. 

Despite BeReal not allowing ads on the platform, a number of brands followed the influx of new users to the app. Chipotle incorporated BeReal into its annual Halloween campaign last year, requiring customers to share a BeReal post of themselves in a Chipotle restaurant to enter its “BooReal” sweepstakes. American Eagle leveraged BeReal in its holiday marketing to promote a different product each day, and brands such as e.l.f Cosmetics and Rare Beauty leaned into behind-the-scenes photos, exclusive promotional codes and humor on the platform as part of their efforts to reach Gen Z.

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But, “even when BeReal was at its peak, very few brands created a presence due to the spontaneous nature of the platform and the clunkiness of building an audience,” social media consultant Rachel Karten said in an email. “Both personally and professionally, I haven’t heard anyone talk about BeReal in at least three months. Never a good sign.”

In 2022, though, the app was a pop culture phenomenon, leading to viral BeReal moments such as a fan handing her phone to Harry Styles when her BeReal notification went off and President Joe Biden sharing a BeReal post to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. Rival social media platforms TikTok and Instagram also jumped on the dual-camera bandwagon and launched BeReal copycats, including the now-defunct TikTok Now feature.

BeReal’s initial burst in popularity, at least among everyday people in 2022, led it to shift its priorities away from any potential marketing efforts and instead focus on “building out the infrastructure and stabilizing the platform,” for the millions of new users flooding it, Hislop said. Now, “we feel like we’re in a very comfortable place where the platform works great, where we're set to iterate and release a bunch of new features, and we think it's now a good time to start communicating to not just our community but educating people beyond our community about why BeReal exists,” he said. 

Hislop declined to share information about these new features other than that BeReal plans to roll them out by the end of the year.

The platform also introduced several features in August, including a “Friends of Friends” feed in which users’ posts are shared with both their immediate connections on the app as well as those friends’ friends; the ability for users to “pin” three posts to the top of their profile; and a mention feature allowing users to tag other people’s usernames in their posts.

Along with acting as a “tribute” to BeReal’s current users and those who engaged with the platform over the past year, BeReal’s global campaign is also intended to attract new users to the platform and “show people that maybe have heard about BeReal but aren't a user yet the kinds of BeReals they can create and what they can see on the platform amongst their friends,” said Emily Moravits, marketing lead for special events at BeReal.

BeReal’s “Realest Person on Earth” competition is just the first phase of a larger marketing push that will roll out over the next few months, he said, but declined to elaborate on what the rest of the campaign will involve. 

“There are still many, many people who don't know what BeReal is,” Hislop said. “They don't know what our mission is, and I think something that we weren't amazing at over the past two years was communicating exactly what BeReal stood for. So [this campaign] is very much about educating on that, as well as giving people a sneak peek into some of the content that is shared on BeReal.”