Campaign: Blood for Beauty
Companies: Lottie London
Agency Partners: Manifest (creative)
Duration: September 19 - October 31, 2022
Budget: $25,000
Blood donations keep people around the world alive. According to the American Red Cross, 29,000 units of red blood cells are needed every day in the U.S. And there is an “urgent blood shortage” in the country, according to The Week.
Given that demand during this spooky time of year, the creatives at Lottie London decided to launch a campaign in the run up to Halloween that would encourage people to give blood by offering them a chance to win a vampire-themed makeup collection.
Strategy
Lottie London launched in 2014 and is a “trend-led beauty brand” whose target market is Generation Z, explained Nora Zukauskaite, global marketing director at Lottie London parent company Brand Agency London
To reach that sector, the brand looked to television shows that would evoke feelings of nostalgia, Zukauskaite said. Earlier this year, Lottie London offered a Gossip Girl-themed collection.
The creatives thought Halloween this year would be especially big given that the threat posed by COVID-19 has waned and life has started to return to normal. After deciding to produce a campaign in conjunction with the holiday, the brand considered other shows and films to partner with, including Twilight but settled on Vampire Diaries because The CW series had the “biggest amount of tags and hashtags and sentiments across our Gen Z audience,” Zukauskaite said.
Lottie London called the makeup collection Love Sucks.
The brand also wanted to tie the campaign to a good cause — donating blood — because Gen Z “demands responsibility,” she said. “They really shine the light on the social or environmental causes that earlier generations have not been very vocal about.”
Tactics
The brand offered its followers a chance to win its Love Sucks collection if they shared images of themselves at a blood donation site in October and tagged @lottielondon on Instagram and/or @mylottielondon on TikTok and used the hashtag #bloodforbeauty.
In developing the campaign content, the creatives tried to strike a balance between something that would inspire people but not make them queasy, Zukauskaite said.
They created graphics that look like something you might see at a blood donation center. One image showed hands cupping a heart and stated, “help us out by donating blood for the #bloodforbeauty initiative.”
Results
Three products from the Love Sucks collection sold out at Walmart stores in the U.S.
The campaign generated coverage from Mashable; Metro; PopSugar; and Seventeen.
TikTok and Instagram posts for the campaign generated: 174,199 views; 362 saves; 3,273 likes; and 357 comments.
