Over the last decade, Burt's Bees has pushed themselves to champion inclusion and diversity throughout their business choices. This applies to the platforms and the creators they collaborate with in paid media. In 2021, Burt's Bees worked with OMD to be a part of a first-to-market partnership with the Omnicom Diverse Creator Network (DCN) to collaborate and amplify diverse voices in the marketplace.
DCN pushes to make systemic changes and break down the barriers of access to media investment for historically disadvantaged media enterprises, media entrepreneurs, and communities. As a purpose-driven initiative to advance Black, LatinX, Asian, and LGBTQ creators, influencers, and minority-owned and operated media across the largest social media platforms, this program was directly intertwined into Burt's Bees mission. It offered an authentic way for Burt's Bees to connect with multicultural millennials, who represent an important audience and one with whom Burt's Bees wanted to drive more robust, more meaningful relationships as a brand.
Twitter was one of the first social partners to join OMG's Diverse Creators Network through mobilizing its strategic resources to help advance representation and create economic opportunities for under-represented communities. As the primary platform for peer-to-peer conversation, they were uniquely suited to host authentic discussions between creators and their followers.
The Approach: Burt's Bees launched their first campaign on Twitter, working with trusted makeup artist and esthetician Tiara Willis as she shared beauty and care tips for women of color on Twitter. In the first phase of the campaign, OMD helped launch pre-roll videos that appeared before Tiara's beauty content as part of a Twitter Amplify sponsorship campaign. The pre-roll videos directed viewers to the Burt's Bees site, where they could purchase lip balms with flavors. This opportunity drove awareness for Burt's Bees Lip Balms while also generating revenue for Tiara due to the rev-share model for creators.
In the Second Phase: Burt's Bees worked on a custom program for Q&A prompts, in which the creators themselves selected the questions from their followers, not the brand. Tiara kicked off the Q&A experience, followed by Burt's second creator, Makeup Artist, Shalya. Both women drew upon their experiences to inform the responses and infused their personal stories to bring the experience to life in only the way they could. The campaign concluded with the distribution of the ten tweets from Shayla & Tiara distributed across the coveted multicultural beauty audience on Twitter.
Overall Media Performance:
The campaign drove 85M Impressions, beating Twitter's Beauty Industry benchmarks for View Rate at 45% (vs. 42% VR Industry) and on-par with industry CPM and CPV.
NCS Sales Data Performance:
Post campaign performance from NCS Sales Data observed a 16.4% sales lift driven by Penetration (exposed households purchased more than control households) and an +8pt lift in consideration for Burt's Bees. The sub-brand category of Lip Care, highlighted in the creative, saw the most robust response, contributing 56% of incremental sales captured. The website card format contributed the most to incremental sales of the various ad units leveraged, while the pre-roll was the most responsive. Twitter Burt's Bees campaign was highly successful, with the majority of incremental sales for total Burt's Bees coming from new brand buyers.
Success with Omnicon's Diverse Creator Network:
For over a decade, Burt's Bees has been active with content creators experts and has sought diverse backgrounds and perspectives as part of this. Still, fostering diversity and inclusion is recognizing how you can continue to do better and address gaps inherent in the system, such as diverse creators not always receiving equity in pay or credit for their content. The DCN activation helped address these gaps, elevating a group of diverse creators, ensuring they're invested in, and furthering visibility to their content. Beyond this, the program offers scale, promoting more creators at once to drive both impact and efficiency.
