In November, Nars took on a unique challenge: to promote a new cosmetics collection using social media without giving away free product or paying for advertising.
The company decided to develop a Facebook app for the Andy Warhol-inspired collection that would allow Facebook users to make over their profile photos and cover photos in the style of Warhol, with prominent Nars branding throughout. (To see it the app in action, check out the video from Nars below.)
Speaking at a WWD conference Wednesday, Heather Park, director of digital media at Nars, said her team wanted to target the cover photo section of users' profiles after discovering that every time a user changes her cover photo, it appears in friends' newsfeeds as a unique rather than a group update (i.e. not as, "13 friends of your friends updated their profiles photos…"). Park said they decided to forgo paid advertising "to see how far we could take it purely on earned [media]."
The app attracted a relatively small number of users — 3,143 — but an impressive amount of engagement: Together, those users made more than 5,300 images and spent an average of seven minutes and nine seconds using the app, generating an estimated 823,000 impressions on Facebook. A little more than half of those users are based in the U.S., but a surprisingly high number (23%) are from Brazil.
Like many creative social media campaigns from established brands, Nars' app enjoyed greater traction off Facebook than on. Earned media impressions totaled 151 million, driven largely by press coverage from tech and beauty blogs, Park said. (Nars calculated that figure by adding up the monthly unique readers of each site that covered the campaign and, in the case of Twitter, but multiplying each tweet about the campaign by the number of followers that particular Twitter user had — in other words, the figure is rather inflated.)
Arguably, the app could have enjoyed far greater pickup if the company had made a modest investment in paid advertising on Facebook — something Maureen Mullen, director of research at luxury/digital research firm L2, has repeatedly advised brands do to increase the reach of their Facebook and multi-channel campaigns. But Nars should be at least be commended for generating that kind of reach without leaning on a giveaway or sweepstakes.
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