Behind e.l.f.'s surprising Super Bowl TV buy

E.l.f. Beauty has been a successful digital and social media marketer for 19 years without many TV ads, including a whopping 49% sales increase last quarter that has sent the company’s stock soaring 22% since earnings were announced on Feb. 1. The value-priced beauty brand’s marketing is best known for such things as its early moves into TikTok and more recently BeReal. But e.l.f. has spent only $583 on linear TV over the past three years, according to iSpot.tv—and that was likely a mistake that slipped through the cracks of relatively small connected TV buys the brand has been trying, according to Chief Marketing Officer Kory Marchisotto. Watch all the Super Bowl commercials From Bud Light to Rakuten and Amazon, see all of the ads Watch them here So that makes e.l.f.’s foray into the Super Bowl all the more surprising. While short of a national buy, e.l.f. will run its first intentional linear TV ad during the Super Bowl—co-written by “The White Lotus” creator/director Mike White with the brand’s longtime agency Shadow—during the second quarter on Fox streaming properties. It will air in nine of the largest local markets including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Washington and San Francisco. The buy, handled by e.l.f.’s performance marketing and media agency Tinuiti, will also put the humorous 30-second spot, featuring “White Lotus” star Jennifer Coolidge, on 78 linear TV networks postgame on Feb.12. A 45-second teaser broke today for the spot, which also kicks off a content series that will live on e.l.f.’s social channels and backed by paid support in the weeks ahead. But why the big push into TV after doing so well on digital and social for so long? Chalk it up to a plan to fuel momentum for e.l.f.’s Power Grip Primer, the brand’s biggest hero product ever and one that currently ranks as the best-selling primer in both mass, according to NielsenIQ, and prestige beauty outlets, according to NPD Group, Marchisotto said. Besides being the top primer on the U.S. market, Marchisotto said it’s also the No. 2 selling cosmetics product overall in mass, without that much space behind the No. 1 product—a mascara she declined to name. The exposure of a Super Bowl ad could certainly put it over the top. “Our community catapulted Power Grip to stardom,” Marchisotto said. “It became one of TikTok’s most viral products, with nearly 70 million organic views.” But that raised a question. “We've already taken over all the digital airwaves,” Marchisotto said. “How do we open the aperture and make this even bigger?” More broadly for the brand, while e.l.f. has climbed over the years to rank fourth in awareness among U.S. cosmetics brands, it’s well behind the top three, she said, and the Super Bowl provides an opportunity to bump up awareness in a hurry. E.l.f., which sells direct to consumers as well as through mass channels, Ulta and Old Navy, has about 14 million consumers, she said. Just the nine local markets in the linear Super Bowl buy should reach 13.5 million, she said. Ideally, that will include a lot of potential customers e.l.f. hasn’t previously reached with digital, social and CTV. Just as big legacy brands have used those media to reach audiences they can no longer get on digital and social platforms, e.l.f. is moving the other direction for similar reasons. “We are always building everything we do on insight,” Marchisotto said. “None of it’s an accident. We didn’t enter TikTok by accident. We entered because people were knocking at our door inviting us into the conversation there. We had 3.5 million hashtags with our name before we even stepped in the front door.” Ad Age Leading Women and Rising Stars Last call for the annual awards Enter here The move to TV started more recently with testing CTV, she said, which has included Netflix. “We had very high performance in CTV,” she said. That led to looking at “is there another way to lean in?” she said. “So this [Super Bowl campaign] is another way of us leaning into our signals.” But it’s not a plan that’s been in the works for long. The brand moved at what it calls “e.l.f. speed,” with three weeks between the decision to run in the game to shooting the video. That included signing the big-name talent and making the buy, with only two weeks between concept development and shooting, Marchisotto said. E.l.f. works with people and agencies that are flexible and fast, she said, so it’s a learn-as-you-go operation. It turned out, Coolidge was already a fan of Power Grip Primer, having been introduced to it by her social media manager, Marchisotto said. “I absolutely love that we didn’t find out about that until we were on set,” she said. The teaser and ultimate Super Bowl ad will focus on the extreme stickiness of Power Grip, an idea that plays across social media in fan videos that call it such things as “sticky slime, face glue and makeup glue,” Marchisotto said. “We realized the viral power of the product and the entertainment value of the stickiness really transcended the product itself into entertainment.” So now e.l.f. will see if its Super Bowl idea sticks.

Behind e.l.f.'s surprising Super Bowl TV buy

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