In 2018 NARS Cosmetics launched Climax Mascara to enter the mascara category and appeal to both new and existing consumers within an extremely crowded and competitive space.
The goal of the campaign was two-pronged: generate mass awareness of Climax and bridge the gap from awareness to purchase intent among w18-34. This was accomplished via a large scale, cross-channel campaign strongly rooted in video. NARS also worked with Google and January Digital to identify the whitespace in the category in order to help the Climax Mascara messaging break through in a highly cohesive, best in class, multitouch media strategy with clear & tangible KPIs to achieve success.
In an incredibly competitive mascara market, the brand team knew that they would have to maximize their creative assets and plan a cohesive experience across channels to break through the clutter.
Early in the process, January Digital and NARS collaborated with Google's brand activation team to analyze the existing assets and fine tune them to maximize impact among consumers to ensure they would resonate. Thus, we were able to create multiple layered messages that drove users through a consideration sequence to capture attention based on stating a clear benefit (volumizing vs curling vs clumping).
NARS and January Digital developed a cohesive strategy across YouTube, Foursquare, Instagram, Conde Nast properties, Snapchat, and programmatic media leveraging different asset types to achieve both campaign objectives and drive the consumer down the funnel through multiple touch points.
To balance the two goals, each media tactic had campaigns that drove awareness, consideration, and intent. By creating multiple touch points, each with separate goals, within each channel, we were able to drive users through consideration sequentially regardless of what channel they had touched or in what order. We learned through testing in video that how-to assets drove consideration, while assets highlighting benefits drove awareness, and applied those learnings across all channels in real-time.
This strategy enabled us to successfully meet our goals collectively but also specifically within each tactic. By being nimble, the team was able to ensure the content was tailored specifically to address the campaign goals, channels, ad formats, call to action and audience targets that the campaign was set to go after.
Through a balanced, cross-channel, multi-touch point campaign, the team was able to exceed goals across the entire campaign and individual tactics:
