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We're chatting about:
→ How Urban Decay gave a cult favourite a creator-first comeback
→ What today's beauty consumers expect from brands
→ Why creating cultural moments beats chasing trends
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’ve been in this industry a long time, nearly 16 or 17 years across marketing, social media and PR, and specifically leading across beauty for the last four or five years. I love it. I live and breathe beauty. I’m a makeup pro by trade, I’ve been a stylist, I’ve lived many lives, but I’m loving what we’re doing at L’Oréal and Urban Decay.
Having worked in both agency and in-house roles, what perspective has that given you on how brands and agencies can collaborate effectively?
It’s interesting. One of my big agency roles was at WPP, and a network agency is always an interesting space. The way you engage with brands is, to some degree, performative. There’s a performance you do, there’s a fluffiness and air that comes with it that clients kind of expect. They want some of that smoke and mirrors, some of the glamour, some of the pitch theatre. I think pitch theatre was lost for a minute.
But when you’re in-house, and I’ve been in-house at Charlotte Tilbury and I’ve been in-house before that as well, what’s really interesting is that you don’t need all that BS. I already know it because I used to spew it too. It’s almost, just get down to business. What can you do? Think smartly about clients not always having the budget. What are the efficiencies you can make? Because what the client really wants to take away is: how are you looking to help my life? That’s what you really want as an agency partner.
So it’s about being a better partner, and then also not being a difficult client. We’ve all had difficult clients who are super demanding with unrealistic timelines. Because I’ve done the job of the agency in so many different iterations, always helping out account teams and creatives as a creative strategist, I know what’s realistic for timelines. So it’s no BS from the agency side, and not being a difficult client on the brand side.
What efficiencies would sell you on an agency partner?
Going a bit above and beyond. The agency-client relationship becomes so pragmatic after the pitch moment. Suddenly you get different members of the team springing up out of nowhere, and you’re like, “okay, why didn’t I meet these in the original setting?” Then unrealistic timelines, things falling by the wayside, everything becomes a bit like, “oh, you wanted this, we’ve given you this,” and it all becomes a scope thing.
I think it’s almost, “you didn’t ask for this, but we’ve gone away and done it.” A bit of the conviction to want to do more for the client, in a realistic way. No one’s expecting you to make up decks out of nowhere and come up with additional strategies for free. But in the world we’re living in, which is harder and where clients are struggling with budgets, it’s little things like, “hey, we just spotted this creator, do you love them?” That’s the personal attitude and the connection you want with an agency. You want to get around the corporateness and the institution of everything and get into the meat of it. Ultimately you want to be an extension of your brand’s team, and that means having personal time and really getting to know each other, knowing the nuances and how you work together. That’s what helps you form the best partnership.
When agencies pitch, the A team is generally in the room, but you may work with different people later. What’s your preference on who’s actually working with you from the outset?
I’ll give you a mixed answer. I like it if the people you’re meeting are going to be on the team, but that isn’t always the way. You always put your A-class people forward depending on the level of the pitch and the budget. I also don’t want an army to show up of 20 people, with an account exec sitting there silent. I have a big thing about: if you’re not meant to be in the room, as in you don’t have anything to add, there’s no real reason for you to be there. Go do something else.
So it’s a bit of a mix. If you’re going to have the senior A team there, at least have the squad just below them, an account manager if you’ve got an account director, just so they can meet the client, understand the context, and then pick up that stuff. We’ve all seen it in the whole grind and churn of agency life, the revolving door. If that person moves on and the account manager has to pick up the mantle, they may have lost some of that context from the pitch. So have your A team there for sure, but you also need to be sympathetic as a client that you’re not necessarily always going to be paying for a strategy director a hundred percent of the time.
There has been a wider shift away from blanket creator briefs towards more collaborative approaches. How do you balance brand objectives with creator freedom?
It’s a tough one. Somewhere like L’Oréal is so commercially driven. We still are and remain the highest-grossing beauty brand in the world, which is very BDE energy for us and fun. But what comes with that is expectation on sellout. It’s monthly analysis of how products are doing at the bottom line, which, even if you don’t want it to, does impact how you think about creators and that relationship.
Because I’ve been client-side and agency-side, I’ve seen so many clients just cluster all the objectives into one. It needs to be views, it needs to be engagement, it needs to be this. As a strategist you’re like, “whoa, what’s your hierarchy of what you want to do?” For instance, for our big launch of Tube Job, the emphasis was on brand awareness and views, so that’s the metric we focused on. That helped with our briefs and our curation of creators. Then for our recent All Nighter campaign, it was more about richer engagement, finding creators who are more niche and community-driven, and catering the brief towards that objective.
So it’s being smart about what you want to get out of it. Having a helicopter view of long-term where you want the brand to go, while also being able to look telescopically at, “okay, what objective makes sense and where are we going?” A lot of brands have lost that strategy side of it. Why are we doing this? It’s not just to appease the big senior board to make money. What’s the point in what you’re doing?
The other piece is nailing down those objectives and sharing them with the creator, looping them in to help them understand the output you want. Too often clients want to keep that stuff close to their chest, but that’s how you build long-term relationships and get real buy-in. When we briefed Sabrina Bahsoon, aka Tube Girl, for Tube Job, I created a deck that was curated and wrapped for her. Creators love a nice ego rub, like we all do. It gave her a peek into the strategy behind the work: why we went with her, what we wanted from her, the inspiration. It tapped her into what we were doing and got her creative juices going. So it ends up getting a better result rather than a blanket approach that treats them like a machine or a tool.
When you invest in that opportunity and give them a really personalised experience, it helps their output. You see them really put work and love into their concepts. There’s no ChatGPT around here, which we’re seeing all too often in the creator industry: briefing decks being created with ChatGPT, so you’re met with ChatGPT concepts or AI-related concepts. When you give creators love and effort early on, they reciprocate.
The connection between agent, client and creator is always interesting. No judgement, no tea to agents. You’re doing a great job, it’s not easy to keep wrangling work. We get bombarded across the L’Oréal advocacy team with agents every day. But you can be smarter. Don’t just share a picture of, “hey, here’s Liv, here’s some posts she’s done, she loves the brand, send us stuff, we’d love to be thought about.” That’s so blanket. Unless I’m really bothered and I have free time, which I don’t, I’m not going to click on that profile. Send me, “here’s some stuff she’s done, these are the statistics, this is what she’s driven.” Agents need to be as strategic, because right now a lot of creators are going solo and thinking about what that looks like themselves, which is an interesting space.
If I’ve got one creator very much aligned with our brand and the brief, and another creator with a similar aesthetic and point of view, if one has a 14% engagement rate and one has 5%, who would you go with? There’s some nitpicking of hairs, because the beauty industry is so saturated that you have to be particular.
You recently launched the All Nighter Setting Spray Outlaster campaign. Tell us how it came to life and what your ethos was behind it.
All Nighter Setting Spray has been synonymous with Urban Decay since we launched the product a very long time ago. It’s what everyone knows about Urban Decay. So when we came to reformulate, because it hadn’t been reformulated for years, the whole setting spray space had transformed. Charlotte Tilbury launched hers, which is amazing and on the top of the charts. One Size has done an amazing job launching a suite of setting sprays that are mostly amazing. There have been amazing new players in the space, so we were feeling like: what are we doing?
Because there have been so many launches, the question was, “what can we do that’s different?” Everyone’s done dancing, everyone’s done the stereotypical Pilates princesses and all of that. Urban is a rebellious brand that represents people who are a bit older, a bit different and a bit more bratty, so we were thinking, “what could we do that’s different?”
We landed on performance, which is why we’ve got a big wrestling event coming up, which we’re very excited about. That just felt like a different space. I’ve been in this world a long time and I’ve seen every beauty launch, so it was, “what could we do that was different?” We ultimately doubled down on the proof points. All Nighter has 24-hour lasting power, and that naturally lends to performance. That’s where we came up with the concept for the Outlaster. It led us to work with different archetypes and the different ways they outlast their lives: journalists, drag queens (who obviously turned up for us), roller skaters, gamers, the whole deal. We got to really show consumers how the product worked in that proof point.
The idea of working with a wrestler was a bit rogue, even for me. I was like, “this feels a bit different,” but it’s those moments that set you apart. People remember them. That’s what Urban is known for. When I joined, we’d just started working with Ari, the self-proclaimed Mattress Actress, who I loved before and was already following on my TikTok. I was like, “this is the direction we’re going in, doing something like this. This is really fun.” That drove me, and it was very different. It was a conversation point. I wanted something similar with the idea of working with a wrestler and with wrestling as an idea for makeup, and not even just wrestling but performance in general. I wanted to widen the scope of what that meant for everyone, rather than going down the more stereotypical routes other brands have done.
Urban Decay has such a strong beauty heritage. The Naked palettes literally ruled the 2010s, and All Nighter is a cult product. How do you approach evolving a legacy brand for newer audiences and platforms?
It’s a fun one. We’re seeing it more and more now. The new Marc Jacobs Beauty revival, which I’m so gassed for, is really interesting. I love what they’ve done.
It’s about being smart. It’s acknowledging your legacy lovers, people who remember the Naked palette, the Heated palettes, Moondust and what that meant. When I was a makeup pro, using Moondust and that Space Cowboy shade for brides for that bridal aesthetic, it’s so synonymous with that. So it’s acknowledging your past, but then staying modern. Acknowledging those heroes, then looking at the beauty industry now, which is so driven by NPD and innovation. There are a lot of brands out there, so many indies. So it’s thinking about your brand, what other brands are doing, where you fit in that space, and then looking at the industry and where you can do something different.
We just had an amazing NPD launch for Tube Job, our tubing mascara, in February. There were loads of other tubing mascaras out, and I think it really helped us that the component looks different. Our branding has had a big re-lift. It’s a challenge to revive a brand that’s so well-loved. People know the packaging, know the aesthetic, but you’re trying to meet that in today’s market where beauty has changed so much.
I don’t like the clean-girl makeup thing. I’m really glad that’s seeing its way out, but I like the pragmatism of it: the way you can do a face really quickly with products that are multifunctional. So it’s taking elements of what’s happening, attaching them to your brand and thinking of new innovations to make it better.
Urban is the rebellious, naughty, but fun, colourful, creative kid of L’Oréal. You’ve got the big dragon brands like YSL and Armani who are doing amazing stuff and really led the way as great makeup icons. Urban has always been that alt queen and we still want to have that alt energy. That’s why L’Oréal got the licence for it, that whole Americanised LA energy that’s so part of the brand. It’s about upping that but then thinking about the modern consumer.
What works for pushing it up the funnel is understanding the commercial viability of that. It’s all cool being alt, but look around you: how are alt queens being received now? How is culture being received now? It’s really interesting to see that not just in the LGBTQ+ community but in the creative industry as well. People are dimming their light a little to acclimatise. So if that’s happening, how are we allowing them to shine, but also respecting them dimming their shine a bit too? It’s playing where you want to be.
That education piece has been interesting for internals as well: understanding we can move the dial a bit and still be rebellious, but rebellious in a new way. It gives you licence to push the boundaries and go back to the values of what started Urban Decay: boundary-pushing, fun, a bit naughty and tongue-in-cheek, but staying true to us as a brand.
How can brands create genuine cultural moments instead of chasing trends?
Look at what Rhode did with Bieberchella. That was a massive cultural moment. Two of the biggest brands in the world coming together, but it wasn’t in a trending way. It was in a really culturally nuanced way. Hailey is creating her own cultural phenomenon, and that’s the big energy people should be hunting for.
It’s not the perpetual battle of “we’re not jumping on trends quick enough,” which is the constant contention with all clients and agencies. “We need to be quicker, we need to be more agile.” There’s an element to that. People can always move faster, you can hire in-house social teams and jump on things. But more importantly: what have you got to say? There’s a lot of conversation and a lot of opinions right now in the space, in beauty, in brands trying to chip in. What have you got that’s interesting to say?
Hailey is fabulous, and I’m sure it’s not just her, she’s got a fabulous team. She was about to launch the Blemish stars, whatever they’re called, and then she put them on her husband, and then they were doing a set. It’s all very smartly planned and part of her brand, but it was just her marketing calendar and then became something they did. So it’s curating it a bit and letting it happen. I think people have lost that a little. They’re trying to force the moment too much. Just let it happen.
That’s not to say some trends aren’t great. I’ve worked on some fab trend moments, like something for Dyson with Victoria’s Secret which was really fun. It’s thinking of moments and how you can tap in. The Met Gala was interesting this year from a makeup point of view. There’s been a lot of divisive makeup discussion. Hudson Williams, the cute kid from Heated Rivalry, had crazy makeup that his artist did, which I had mixed feelings on. I’m not about to set up some massive makeup debate, but it was divisive. People were like, “it’s not good, it’s messy, they could have done it this way.” Loads of people reinterpreted it. It was an unintentional moment that happened, and creators jumped on it.
That’s the thing you want. Same with the Gucci Demna moment they’ve just had in New York. The makeup was heavy: heavy eye, big lip. It’s interesting to see makeup causing a bit of a stir now and becoming its own little thing, which is fun. That Gucci campaign was banging around Times Square, iconic. Gucci is doing amazing stuff, they’re so back. I love vintage brands that can be revived. Dior is another one. I love what Jonathan Anderson is doing right now. It’s so fresh, so modern, so cool compared to what was happening before, which was just circling the drain. Interesting to see brands get revived again. Urban Decay too, from us as well.
A lot of brands talk about being culture-led. What does that actually look like in practice when building social and influencer strategy?
It’s not always looking at competitors. I’ve worked for brands obsessed with being number one or always looking at what other people are doing. It’s worthwhile looking at what your sister brands and competitors are doing, but you lose focus on what you can do as a brand. If you’re so focused over there, you forget what’s over here.
For me, being culture-led is having a smart team. Team is really important. If you have an anachronistic team or a very young team, you’ll miss out on opportunities somewhere. You need a mixed team of ages, demographics and points of view, to build a wider picture of culture, because culture is so many different things to different people.
I’ve seen it with a few brands where they get so obsessed with being cool and being culturally led that they forget their consumer entirely. It’s all cool being culturally led, I love that, I’m very creative. But you’ve got to make money. What’s the end goal of that consumer? If your consumer isn’t a cool bratty kid in the middle of London, who are you speaking to? How are you speaking to the person in the Midlands who’s a mum and just wants to use All Nighter all the time? So many people use beauty across so many different age demographics, sexes and races, and everyone has so many individual needs.
What are today’s beauty consumers expecting from brands?
Brand isn’t enough anymore. Whilst brand is brilliant, it isn’t enough. Efficacy is a huge one in beauty. Brand will only get you so far, you won’t buy it again. Tube Job is a fantastic launch. It was one of the first things I worked on as soon as I joined the team as a new NPD, and I was like, “wow, this is sick.” The effects, the length of the lashes, the component is fab, the removal is great. All the key touch-points showed consideration of the consumer, what they’re after, what you’re after in the market. It was different enough. I’m on my third or fourth Tube Job component myself. Once you’ve bought it and you’re obsessed with it, you keep buying it. We had that with All Nighter too. Redoing the formula was a bit of a risk for us, but the people who have been enjoying it, love it.
Skin is even harder. I’m more of a makeup head than a skin-obsessed person, but skin intellectuals are wild. They know so much about skin. Back in the day, people used to pull the wool over each other’s eyes and use terminology they didn’t understand. I loved that whole Ordinary campaign to that end. Consumers are so savvy. There are a lot of brands out there. You really need to think about what makes a great brand and who’s doing cool stuff that actually works.
We’re seeing the rise of really educated creators too: dermatologists, beauticians, makeup artists. There’s a real space for creators with those skilled credentials. More often than not, that’s who brands want to work with, and that’s who audiences want to hear from.
Favourite book or podcast you’d recommend?
Book-wise, I love The Knight and the Moth. It’s a bit of fantasy. I’m a BookTok girly. It’s one of my favourites because I’m a romantic person. I’m an Aries, so we’re hard on the outside, soft on the inside.
Podcast-wise, I love what used to be called Day One Agency. I think their new thing is called Side Projects. They’re amazing, love them. They’re out in the States and I’ve been following them for years since they started really doing podcasts. It’s kind of like an American version of an agency discussion podcast.
Best piece of advice you’ve received?
The power of ignoring. When I was agency side, we all lose our patience. I’m a hothead by nature, I’m passionate, and that’s what drives my creative spirit. But there’s a power in just ignoring a message. The way we live and work now, everything is so instant, you have to get back to someone immediately. Learning to let things breathe, letting your mind settle, letting mood settle, is something we could all learn a bit from. So the power of ignoring and just letting things sit for a minute was a great piece of advice.
And shielding and shining. I’ve seen a lot of discourse around Gen Z and how challenging they can be to work with, which is somewhat valid. But it’s also about protecting them and giving them tools. Be the boss you wanted to see, rather than delegating out and making their lives hell because your life was hell. How do you make their lives better and make your own self better? It’s good advice.
Favourite beauty product?
I’ll always be an eyeshadow kid because I love to paint. So Makeup By Mario, I know it’s not an Urban product. For Urban, I’d say Tube Job is probably my favourite that we’ve done so far. The new one coming out in July will probably be my second favourite. But in terms of a product I love, I love an eyeshadow palette. The Makeup By Mario Master Mattes: I used it for my wedding, and it’s one of the only palettes I’ve re-bought two or three times because it’s just so good. It’s an artist palette for artists. And I’ll throw the Naked palette in there as well. OG of OGs.
