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Betches x Maybelline Fit Me Foundation

Entered in Branded Content

Objective

Betches is a multimedia brand developed and run for women, by women. We’re a safe space to vent, scream, and deliver scathing hot takes on everything that pisses you off; an honest sounding board for advice on relatable, real-life sh*t. Betches reaches 250 million monthly users across our website, social, podcast, and newsletter networks with an engagement rate 15x higher than our competitors, and is the cultural authority in humorous women’s media.

Betches’ and Maybelline’s (L’Oreal) collective goal was to drive awareness for Maybelline’s Fit Me Foundation among our female millennial audience and encourage the Betches audience to take the “Find My Fit” online quiz to help users select the perfect product SKU and shade for them. Betches and Maybelline leveraged a combination of branded content, experiential, and podcast advertising strategies to bring the partnership and campaign to life.

Strategy

Betches’ overall strategy to drive awareness for Maybelline’s Fit Me Foundation and “Find My Fit” quiz was a multi-tiered approach that started by responding to Maybelline's RFP. Based on a few key goals and brand KPIs built to reignite love & stimulate growth for the brand through new and never been done before executions, and driving new and existing users to purchase, Betches proposed a 360 branded content campaign with an experiential tentpole activation. 

Following a series of brainstorms and feedback from Maybelline (L’Oreal), Betches rooted the partnership in Betches' award-winning U Up? Podcast Live Tour and complemented the tentpole activation with an evergreen 360 branded campaign spanning social storytelling and engaging polls, meme feed posts, custom videos, and reels rooted in Betches and Betches Brides verticals plus audio midroll support across a variety of Betches Network podcasts. 

U Up? Live Package

To kick off the partnership, Betches & U Up? recommended Maybelline Fit Me Foundation participate as a supporting partner of the U Up? Live Tour – Betches largest tentpole activation reaching nearly 5,000 engaged fans IRL. U Up? Live features a variety of on-stage elements spanning listener-submitted dating scenarios to the podcast’s ever-popular Red Flag or Deal Breaker segment. 

For Maybelline Fit Me Foundation, Betches proposed the ‘Dating App Makeover’, providing the perfect platform to communicate Maybelline’s Fit Me Foundation to the masses in a way that was endemic to both Maybelline and the show segment - a win/win for the brand and our listeners. 

In this segment, the show’s co-hosts Jordana Abraham and Jared Freid go through listener-submitted dating profile screenshots and provide the audience member up on stage (and the whole audience) with tangible feedback on how they would revise prompts or select different photos. The conversation perfectly integrated the “find your fit” messaging on stage – both in “finding your fit” in a partner through the best execution of your dating profile, but also the right fit for your perfect shade of Maybelline Fit Me Foundation. 

Additionally, Betches developed co-branded mirror clings placed around each U Up? Live venue offering fans and attendees stylish and fun mirror selfie moments to add to Maybelline’s #fitmefoundation hashtag. 

The U Up? Live Tour Package also included a strategic mix of pre-event/ticket purchase promotions, live interactive content, and post-event recaps across Betches and U Up? social accounts. 

Evergreen Media & Content

To round out the partnership with evergreen content through social and podcasts, Betches (alongside Betches Brides, The Betchelor and U Up?) content teams strategized with branded content and integrated marketing leads to develop humorous content concepts rooted in timely trends and topics including “main character moment” and wedding beauty makeup trends. Following the concept development, Betches collaborated with Maybelline and their agency, Beauty CoLab to fine-tune each concept, creatively developed each deliverable which included designing in-feed memes leveraging Maybelline Fit Me Foundation assets to complement the post, scripting and filming the reels/videos integrating Maybelline Fit Me Foundation into the narrative, and developing engaging Instagram Stories to provide an interactive format for our audience to engage with. 

Results

Overall, the Betches x Maybelline Fit Me Foundation campaign outperformed on all KPIs including impressions and engagement rates. Specifically for the U Up? Live Tour, the event series sold out in multiple markets and Maybelline was able to reach 4,700+ fans across New York City, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. Lead-up promotions and live-coverage social posts received high engagement rates. Click-through rates for co-branded ticket drivers performed 100% to benchmark goals in terms of click-through rates, which resulted in multiple sold-out events. Live coverage recap posts performed 40% higher in terms of engagement rate. Throughout the U Up? Live Tour sponsorship period (March - June 2023) Maybelline saw a 52.69%* increase in Interest Score vs. its daily average. 

Betches and Maybelline’s Fit Me evergreen content also outperformed brand KPIs. A few stand out posts include:

The collective program delivered 106.49% of impressions vs. the originally planned goal and resulted in a 6.83%* increase in Average Instagram Followers vs. its daily average in 2023. Additionally, the U Up? Live Tour received an Adweek Audio Award for Best Podcast Event.

*SOURCE: ListenFirst Time Window Comparison Report. Metrics are vs. brand vs daily average in 2023.

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Betches

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