Inside e.l.f. made, e.l.f. Beauty’s new entertainment arm

Flaunt Weeekly

By Kimeko McCoy • December 17, 2024 •

Over the last few years, marketers have been trying to flip their position in the cultural zeitgeist — making moments themselves as opposed to retroactively marketing around them. That’s why e.l.f. Beauty has built out its own entertainment arm, e.l.f. made, tasked with creating of the moment content around music, movies, gaming and sports.

Thanks to the short-form content boom, advertisers like e.I.f Beauty have been working to move at the so-called speed of culture. While key agency partnerships remain intact for brand activation, an in-house entertainment arm allows the beauty brand to produce branded content fast enough to keep up with trends.

In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Patrick O’Keefe, e.l.f. Beauty’s chief integrated marketing officer, talks about building out e.l.f. made, branded entertainment and how success will be measured with the new entertainment arm.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Seats at the e.l.f. made table

It is definitely a broad team of people. I give a lot of credit to our brand team and to our creative teams, and then the integrated marketing team. And of course, Kory [Marchisotto]our CMO under her vision. But the reality is the trifecta of creative brand and marketing teams working together really is the magic secret sauce of how we get stuff out there fast, and in a timely manner to really address in the moment what’s happening in culture.

Measuring success

We’re a publicly traded company, so we are very careful about how we spend our dollars and how we make them efficient. Every campaign has its own unique metric, KPI. Our investors are trained to look at earned media value, which is through influencers and creators. And earned media value is one metric of how we show up, and how we show up in ranking against our competitive set. We also look at, if it’s a social campaign, it’s around views, it’s around engagement metrics. There are also KPIs to support from a PR impression [standpoint].

‘It’s got to have all those layers’

This year, we’ve done more campaigns and created more entertainment than we had in the previous four years. And the lessons that we’ve learned is that we know that when we continue to find something that talks to the audience, it sparks a conversation. Then we learn more, and then we do more. So it’s got to be quality, it’s got to be thoughtful, it’s got to be strategic and it’s got to be insightful. It’s got to have all those layers. It’s not just for the sake of putting something out, just for the sake of doing it.

https://digiday.com/?p=563621