For the holiday season, we wanted to film a gift guide that would showcase Fenty Beauty products, highlighting our newest "CHILL OWT" holiday collection launch products as well as our core products such as our PRO FILT'R Foundation and STUNNA Lip Paint. Our goal was to bring awareness to our products and highlight them in a way that would really connect to viewers and capture their attention.
We didn't want to just do any regular holiday gift guide— we wanted to make headlines with a viral video.
Our first mission was to find the right candidate to star in our holiday gift guide video. We knew we had to find someone who felt like a natural extension of the brand as well as someone who could use their humor to engage and convert people. We immediately thought of reality TV star Tiffany "New York" Pollard as the perfect fit— even 12 years after her appearance on "Flavor of Love" her internet celebrity status is solidified from her over the top reactions and memes that are still shared all over the internet through reaction GIFs every day.
Tiffany also had a deep love for the Fenty Beauty brand, knew our products, and could speak about them in an authentic way.
Picking the perfect person made everything else fall into place easily. We shot the video within a few hours letting her naturally be her wild, hilarious self in front of the camera and letting her talk through her favorite Fenty Beauty products.
We launched our video, Holiday Gift Guide With Tiffany "New York" Pollard, across our social channels on December 16th, and the video spread all over the internet.
We wanted to make headlines, and it worked. Our holiday gift guide video with New York was written up about by W Magazine, Paper Mag, Elle, Refinery29, Vibe, and many more. Mobile Marketer mentioned in an article that Fenty Beauty "lead social media mentions for holiday gift shopping" and was "the top brand on Twitter" because of our video, racking more engagements than other brands that week according to data from Talkwalker shared with Mobile Marketer. They also said "Rihanna has demonstrated the power of her personal brand in marketing cosmetics on social media. Her Fenty Beauty Gift Guide led Twitter in mentions during the holiday shopping season, and got a boost on YouTube with an appearance by reality star Tiffany "New York" Pollard".
In the weeks following the launch of the video, we saw an immediate lift in sales across all of the products that were featured— as high as +50% on one of the lip products mentioned.
Most importantly, our audience loved it. Here are some of the comments we received on our YouTube video:
