Launching a new primer for a brand whose entire identity is built on primer is either the easiest brief in the world or the hardest. At Smashbox, it was the latter. The stakes were high, the competitive set was aggressive, and the brand was mid-repositioning, meaning the launch had to do two jobs simultaneously: drive immediate commercial performance and reinforce a brand story that was still being rebuilt.

The strategy was to go bigger and more coordinated than the brand had ever gone before. Silkscreen became the vehicle for Smashbox's first-ever simultaneous multi-channel global campaign -- paid, earned, owned, OOH, and retail all in market at the same time, aligned to a single creative brief, executed across five agency partners.

The paid media strategy pushed the brand into first-time territory. OOH ran across key markets in formats the brand had never used, including traveling video billboards alongside traditional placements. On digital, the campaign significantly outperformed benchmarks across every platform: TikTok delivered a cost-per-link-click five times below benchmark. The YouTube masthead reached 25% of the beauty mavens audience within 24 hours of launch at a CPM 2.6x below benchmark. Total paid media impressions reached 157M.

Earned media matched the paid performance. Across influencer programming, a large-scale mailer, press events, and tease activations, the launch generated over 1 billion press impressions, 163M+ in reach, and more than $4M in total EMV, making it one of the most successful earned media campaigns in the brand's history.

Finally, through my personal relationships, Smashbox secured a presence at the Teen Vogue Summit at no-cost. The summit, a high-profile event targeting Gen Z and hosted by one of the most respected women's lifestyle publications in the country, offered Smashbox makeup sessions for 500 attendees before they received headshots, along with samples of the new Silkscreen Primers.

At retail, Smashbox primers were up 39% at launch, and the most telling number wasn't from the new collection. The brand's hero Original Photo Finish Smooth & Blur Primer, untouched by the relaunch, ran 14 points ahead of the overall primer category trend, a halo effect that demonstrated the campaign had strengthened the entire franchise, not just driven trial of the new SKUs. 

Photo Finish Primerizer won the 2022 Allure Best of Beauty Award for Best Primer, among other industry recognitions.