Wella Education is a collaborative community where trend-setting salon professionals come to share, explore, learn, and inspire. It’s the top destination for beauty professionals to engage with Wella's full range of offerings, covering audiences on all major social media platforms. We developed the Wella Education Exposed video series to bring valuable long-form video education and entertainment to their YouTube channel.
In creating the Wella Education Exposed video series, we had three specific goals that we set out to accomplish. First, we wanted to help Wella Education refresh their YouTube channel and grow their audience on the platform. In order to do so, we knew we needed to differentiate ourselves from other educational hair brands and channels on the platform. Second, we wanted to find a fresh and fun way to bring valuable long-form education and entertainment to salon professionals through owned video content. We knew that the traditional step-by-step process videos were overplayed in the industry and we wanted to create a series that was both educational and entertaining for our target demographic. Third, we wanted to elevate Wella’s incredibly talented artists in order to highlight the many diverse career paths available within the beauty industry. We know that our audience values authenticity and we wanted to shine a light on real artists in their real spaces working behind the chair.
The purpose of Wella Education is to inspire and empower our community of salon professionals through education and shared resources. We’ve found that hairdressers are more apt to trust other hairdressers & industry professionals vs. brands and we wanted to deliver our long-from education in a way that felt real and authentic. Additionally, we knew that in order to keep our audience engaged, we needed to include an element of entertainment in our educational video series. In creating the Wella Education Exposed series, we were inspired by reality tv and popular cooking/blogging shows that deliver education in a raw, gritty, and humorous setting.
The campaign featured four Wella Education Exposed installments in total, each made up of four (or more) videos, showcasing a different Wella Artist (or Artists), and highlighting a new haircut or color trend.
We set aside 1-2 full days for shooting with each Artist in their salon or studio space in order to capture them in their natural habitat. We had two cameramen on-site and leveraged a “run & gun” video camera setup in order to achieve that authentic vlogger-style feel. Our videographers worked closely with the talent and our small client team while on-site.
We captured four long-form videos with each Artist, resulting in four installments of the Wella Education Exposed series in total. The first video in each installment is a sizzle reel teasing the content to come in order to generate excitement. The second is a long-form video in which the Artist takes the viewer through a full hair transformation complete with educational #PROtips and techniques. The third is an interview-style video in which we asked our Wella Artists a series of fast-paced questions about their career and the future of the beauty industry at large. The final video in each installment is a bloopers compilation from the full day of filming with each Artist that serves to invite our audience into the behind-the-scenes.
For us, the biggest challenge was to find a way to ensure that each video fit into one of our three content buckets; valuable, educational, or fun/trendy, in a way that felt authentic to our community. We wanted to ensure that each video in the series lent itself to one of these buckets in order to engage our audience and add value for our viewers.
The Wella Education Exposed series was a major success in many ways, but most importantly, it helped us increase content and reach while providing valuable education for our audience, and showcasing our talented portfolio of Artists in a way that felt fun, fresh, and authentic.
Through this series, we were able to highlight four trending hair techniques all while capturing our talented Artists in their salon/studio spaces, showcasing their unique personalities, and sharing the “secret sauce” with our community of hairstylists and beauty pros through education. We positioned the brand as both on-trend and as a destination for relevant education for hairdressers looking to elevate their skills on popular styles. By filming artists in their own spaces, we were able to show how much Wella Education cares for their community of salon pros and shine a light on the reality of working in professional beauty and the many different career paths available within the industry.
We’ve received over 1 million views on the series on YouTube alone and gained an additional +3,500 followers on our channel since publishing the first video. We were also able to take this long-form content and break it up into short-form educational clips featuring bite-sized #PROtips and techniques for YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok, expanding the reach and value of this content across our other platforms.
