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A
Hello and welcome back to the Barefaced Podcast. The podcast revealing the beauty industry's untold stories. I'm your host Lily, a digital marketer and data science student. And this is Barefaced, a research and insights company that specializes in beauty. We help beauty brands source, interpret and utilize data to understand the ever changing beauty customer. And today we're going to be looking at how hashtag ad has changed the beauty industry and everything from what the beauty influencer landscape looked like before ad, why and when AD was introduced, the evolution of its legislation, and how brands can best use the current landscape to maximize reach without sacrificing customer loyalty. For those that are unfamiliar, AD is the most common and popular tag that influencers now by law have to use on all content that has been at all paid for by a brand. This did not used to be the case though, as we know that influencing is a pretty new business. And in the last 10 years the legislation has changed so much as our media literacy has developed and more and more regular regulatory bodies have gotten involved in its marketing, in its ability to sell us product. And what blows my mind is that how few people talk about how this has impacted particularly the business landscape, let alone how this has changed consumer relationships with both influencers and brands, brands and how we shop and how that's changed our behaviors on social media and how our desire for different types of content has again evolved the beauty business over the last kind of decade. So firstly, a disclaimer. The following episode is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Today we're diving into the evolution of the hashtag AD and how it shaped social media marketing. But please note that I am by no means at all a legal expert. Everything discussed in this episode is based on my own research and personal observations and should not be taken as legal advice. I'd like to recommend that everyone interested in this space, particularly in Australia, goes and checks out the ACCC Govau Instagram account which is the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission who posts really great educational content about the laws and regulations in place, but in a way that's really digestible. They also have on their website you can sign up to receive media releases. I'd also like to recommend that you go and give the Social Law co a follow on Instagram. They are a social media media law firm based on the Gold coast who specialize in this area. It's pretty hard to talk about the law comprehensively for numerous countries. There's a few mentions of the US and the uk, but this will be looking very much at the Australian landscape. But enough of that, let's jump into it. So let's go back in time to the birth of beauty influencing beauty. Blogging and beauty vlogging didn't really take off until the introduction of video. So that was when YouTube launched in 2005. Beauty tutorials were some of the first on the platform, and certainly some of the biggest, making beauty one of the first defining niches on YouTube. Video was a medium for beauty, specifically long form video, where you could see a product in action, Whether that was just the application and through a tutorial, or how it wore throughout the day, or side by side comparisons of other products was transformative in beauty business and how we shop for beauty products. In the early stages of YouTube, it was makeup that really took off in the beginning in because it was the easiest to understand. You could see the color payoff of a product as it went on. You could see the way that a foundation would sink into pause as opposed to understanding formulations or all of the complex ways that we engage with beauty education nowadays. By the early 2010s beauty, YouTube was a thing. It was established enough that there were people that were checking into creators weekly, people were posting weekly, and there were some creators that were really starting to become known on the platform. And this was the first instance of remotely being able to assess a product's efficacy. Before that, you had to go into a store to be able to see how a product performed, and you were kind of swept up in the sales ability of someone at a beauty counter. And what you bought was dependent on what store you went into and how you could best articulate what you wanted from a beauty product. That was kind of it, because the only people that had had this level of education, unless you went to a beauty school, were sales associates. For the average person, what that looked like was they started to have creators that they trusted, and they began to base beauty purchasing decisions around that. But for others, YouTube started to open up the world of beauty. And suddenly people were able to research and compare products like they never had before. Because before then, the beauty industry was really built on your retail footprint, on being at the right place, at the right time, with the right type of customer. And that was how brands grew. So again, we had this really high barrier to ent to launch a beauty brand, because that was costly. It was costly to get in front of the right people, because you had to have all of this capital to have a store. But it was in this early 2010s that we started to see signs of social media being able to drive beauty sales. For example, Michelle Fan in 2010 was known for her like of Lancome products using the Art Liner eyeliner and the Hypnos Drama Mascara in her tutorials. Those products saw a substantial uptick in sales. Similarly, Zoella did a review of the Maybelline Baby Lips lip Balm in 2013, which also created a surge in demand for the product. I think one part of the conversation that gets left out a lot here was some of the OG beauty youtubers who were able to utilize their own followings to grow brands. And obviously it is a tried and tested formula now, particularly with if it just feels like an influencer or a celebrity is launching a brand every other week. But in Like I'm talking 2008, beauty YouTuber Marlena Snell launched Makeup Geek. The brand started as a resource for makeup tutorials and educational content, but quickly evolved into a full fledged cosmetics line. Similarly, British YouTubers Sam and Nick Chapman Pixiwoo launched Real Techniques Makeup Brushes in 2011. Real Techniques brushes reportedly reached 30 million in annual sales by 2014, only three years after launching. Talk about entrepreneurship like Makeup Geek isn't around today, but Marlena really did something never seen before. It was crazy. And while few brands were trusting the platform enough to make it a key part of their marketing strategy this early on, the consumer acts globally started to take notice. For example, in 2013, the impact of these creators was significant enough that in the US the Federal Trade Commission or the FTC updated its guides concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The updated guidelines emphasized that need for clear disclosure of material connections between endorsers and brands. The FTC's guidance made it clear that any endorsement, including social media posts, must be accompanied by disclosure if there is financial or material relationship between the endorser and the brand. But the guidance around making it clear wasn't very well defined, leading them to update the terms many, many times in years to come as this landscape evolved. I just want to footnote this point in time because it's so interesting that years and years later with the gift hindsight, we can start to notice things that were at play here. Like this study in 2020 titled YouTube Vloggers Popularity and Influence the Roles of Homophily, Emotional Attachment and Expertise, which I will link in the show notes because it's a very, very interesting read, even if you just skim through the conclusion. But they examine how emotional attachment and credibility influence the popularity of a vlogger and how that impacts viewers Beauty purchasing decisions. What they found was twofold. Firstly, a YouTube beauty blogger's expert no significant effect on their popularity. Emotional connection did. Secondly, a vlogger's popularity was the most significant purchasing driver at the time. We didn't even have the language to understand the influence of these videos on our purchasing behaviors. They were just fun and there was space for that. But it was also just this development of a new space that we just had never seen before. So we couldn't analyze it the way we can now. What this study really highlights is the significance of social proof at the time and the lack of media literacy that any of us had. But of course, we didn't even know what this was. By definition, social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people replicate the actions of others in attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. In essence, it's the notion that since others are doing it, I should be doing it too. The reason that this happened, and we saw so much of it on YouTube specifically, was because a huge downfall of YouTube was how terrible discovery was. Majority of the content that you consume on YouTube comes from the homepage which only recommends you 9ish videos or the suggested videos that appear down the side when you finished watching another video. And this meant that it was really hard to break into YouTube and it was really important that people subscribed because it would signal to the algorithm that the creator's content should be showed to that viewer. Again, what this did is it pushed more than just a domino effect. It meant that growth on YouTube was really exponential. The rate of growth a YouTuber would have would just increase on itself because the more people that would engaged, the more people you would get put in front of. And this meant that big creators just kept getting bigger. Smaller creators would grow so, so, so, so, so slowly. The number of likes and comments would inflate legitimacy and manufacture credibility. Like that study showed, someone that had more likes was trusted more than any other factor that was their credibility. What bigger creators just getting bigger did was it fostered this true creator loyalty and actual influence. Because you are more likely to check back in with a after week because you're being shown their content and you are more likely to trust them. So you watched less people, but you trusted them more because you had this relationship with them. Because once you subscribed, which you would do a lot less frivolously than you would now. Because following someone or subscribing to someone would actually impact the content that would show up on your homepage rather than now if you follow someone on TikTok, for example, it just kind of signals to the algorithm that you want to see more of similar or adjacent content, not necessarily that creator. This community element was pushed even more by discovery being so bad, because for creators to get in front of new audiences, they had to do that by collaborating with each other. That's when we saw so many YouTubers kind of coming in pairs. In the makeup space. Think of Laura Lee, Manny Mua or Katy and Desi, or Shani Griman and Michael Finch. Or in other areas, there was Cody Ko and Noelle Miller, or of course, the iconic sister squad with James, Emma and the Dolan twins. It was the mid 2010s where the influence of influencers became indisputable. Nikkie tutorials revealed that she used the Nivea Man Post Shave Balm as a makeup primer. And the unconventional product led to a surge in popularity for the balm, which sold out in several countries. In 2017, Tati Westbrook used the L'Oreal Voluminous Lash paradise mascara. That is a mouthful and a half. The mascara sold out online at Target and Walmart. The space was still so new that no one had a baseline for the value of an influencer recommendation or review. So there are countless stories of influencers trading large amounts of work for no money at all, or just new product or very famously, NikkieTutorials created a palette with Too Faced and years later publicized that she was paid a flat fee for 50k and no royalties. With hindsight, this is crazy. Like I know now NikkieTutorials has 14 million followers. She is like an OG when it comes to makeup. And Too Faced was so popular at the time, largely I imagine thanks to her, if they partnered together. So a no royalty contract and only 50k for that amount of what I imagine would have been sales is insane. But it's so indicative and reflective of the time where we didn't have that understanding. We didn't understand how big this was. Beauty brands started to send mass PR. For some reason, the term PR, particularly in a beauty YouTube context, translated to what is actually known as organic seeding. And it was sending influencers product with no pressure to post. This no pressure to post narrative that we saw from most brands was intentional at this point because a pressure to post came with the need for disclosure of sponsorship. Sending PR became very, very popular in so many industries, but beauty was really foundational in that. And what this did is it was it changed beauty business so significantly. First of all, forged this new category of content of unboxings and really big creators doing like, like beauty room tours where they would just show the mass amounts of product that they had. Guilty as charged. I ate that shit up. And it really pushed this insane level of consumption. But what this changed so significantly was the product release cycle. Because traditionally and Even now in 2024, beauty brands most often have a hero skew, which is like the product that they are best known for and usually drive majority of their sales. But what this did, when you had these creators, and again there were only very few of them that were reviewing so much product and you had a guaranteed couple hundred thousand people that were going to go and watch that, we saw this fast fashion ification of beauty really where they were just. They went away from the hero product thing and they went more towards newness. Newness, newness because they knew people would buy it because that was the type of content we were consuming. We just wanted the latest and the greatest. It gave you this craving to try everything. I know I wanted to try the most blendable, the highest pigment. I remember at one point this was in the bronzer craze of, I don't know, 2016, you know, contouring, Kim Kardashian, that whole thing. I would have had like five bronzers. Because while beauty YouTube had viral products as TikTok does now, it. What it had that TikTok doesn't have is that newness cycle is that you always knew about a new product launch in a way that nowadays days, unless you're a really loyal follower of a brand, you just wouldn't know. You would need enough people getting behind a product before it got to your social feeds, or you would need that one viral video of a product before it came up on your social feed. It wouldn't necessarily be related to newness as it was back in the YouTube days. But anyway, this point in time, the PR unboxing craze of beauty YouTube is where it all starts to get a bit blurry. Because viewers were now conscious that brands would send influencers product which we hadn't had in the past or in some cases even pay them. But we didn't know when or where or why this was happening. All we knew is that there was a lot we weren't seeing. So this was kind of the foundational seed of viewers questioning influences, of viewers being suspicious. Because before then it was kind of this really devoted trust in that creator, a really devoted relationship, friendship, even, you know, the early days of parasocial relationships, which again, we, we have the literacy and the comprehension and even the language to understand that now. But at the time it was just kind of like this is a little bit sus. I love this person, but I am now just, just a little bit. Not enough to do anything, but just a little bit kind of questioning of their behaviors. So it was at this time that influencers impact to sell products was undeniable. But people were beginning to become skeptical. So brands knew that for their review to be believable, for their review to be impactful, they needed to sell that product in a way that they didn't have to before. So what they needed was skin in the game. So we started to see brands collaborating with influencers. Rather than just doing a sponsored review, why not have them create a product in partnership with you? The amount that they were involved has forever been undisclosed and I'm sure very, very varied between creators. But, but for influencers with the capital they started to launch their own brands, namely Kylie Jenner who launched Kylie Cosmetics in 2015. And for those that didn't have the capital, they did product collaborations with brands. So in May 2015 we got the iconic Jaclyn Hill x Becca Cosmetics RIP champagne pop highlight. The product sold out within 20 minutes of its launch on Sephora's website and amassed over 25,000 units sold in its first day. And it went on to sell over a hundred thousand units soon after 2017. Patrick Starr and Mac Cosmetics also in 2017, Jaclyn Hill and Morphe. November 2018, James Charles and Morphe and then Morphe became really well known for collaborating with influencers. And as they grew this reputation, influencers wanted to be a part of that. So the influx of positive reviews for Morphe products was wild. The brand became cult like because you had these huge creators that were endorsing Morphe, which is fairly affordable product. So it just took off. And again in hindsight you can kind of see that this was the start of this gray area. Brands created by teasing huge incentives for speaking positively about a brand without payment. Because as creators became known for liking Morphe product, it made more sense for that creator to go on and then create a product with Morphe in years to come, right? Like it was an alliance, but you could manufacture alignment. So at this point it's mid to late 2000 and tens and some of the large governing bodies updated their legislation. So in 2016 the Australian competition and Consumers act, the ACCC released guidelines for influencer marketing emphasizing that any content with a commercial relationship should be disclosed. This guidance include the use of hashtags such as ad or sponsored. A year later, 2017, the UK Advertising Standards Authority, the ASA, began to enforce stricter guidelines on influencer marketing. The ASA issued guidance requiring that posts be labeled with clear and unequivocal terms such as hashtag ad to indicate the content is sponsored. Something I didn't understand for years was just kind of like what a hashtag is. And what hashtags are in essence is they're grouping of like terms. So grouping things like hashtag beauty as being findable under beauty. But what that also does is it signals to the algorithm the type of content. So hashtag ad was the type of content that was sponsored. And what this did do that was great is that it streamlined the kind of understanding that we had around sponsored content. We knew that once you saw ad what that was and it was really good for consumer understanding. But what it was really, really bad at was that it signaled to the algorithm that that content had been paid for. And at the time, sponsored posts were very, very often kind of this really boring script that a brand would give to an influencer to read. Rigid and uninteresting and kind of it was bad content. So what this did is it gave the algorithm this understanding of hashtag ad as being bad content. And it would start to kind of demote content that had ad. Which meant that we saw brands and influencers doing really sus things to dodge the use of ad. And it is no coincidence that it is at this time that we are introduced to BrandTrips. This was unbelievably sneaky given authorities globally were starting to really crack down on fair advertising and paying influencers for testimonials. Because what it did is it created this gray area, a similar gray area that we were talking about before with Morphe incentivizing particularly bigger creators to talk positively about the brand with kind of hanging over this potential huge incentive. Brand trips supercharged that because obviously launching a product in collaboration with a brand is a pretty big deal. But what was less of a big deal was going on a free holiday on a luxurious all expenses paid holiday. So influencers never wanted to speak badly about a brand in fear of ruining potential partnerships. Particularly brands that became known for taking influencers on these holidays. So benefit taking influencers to Ibiza in 2015, Fenty in Paris, 2Face Bora Bora both in 2016, Tarte with their very infamous trippin with Tarte in 2017, Nars to Marrakesh in 2017. And there were countless, countless more. Like even the fact that Tarte had that hashtag TrippinWithTart. They intentionally created not only a trip trip, but the recurrence of a trip. These trips became a goal for many influencers to get invited on because it was a two way benefit, right? Like they didn't have to seem like a sellout for doing sponsored posts. And then it was also kind of just like an undeniable. Of course you'd say yes to an all expenses, you know, luxurious trip. So people didn't hate on them for going. And I don't hate on them for going. I think it's a very understandable thing to say yes to. But you can't deny that it, it was brilliantly strategic marketing. Whether you love them or hate them. It was clever. People talking negatively about brands, period. But particularly the big brands that were hosting these trips pretty much just disappeared. And this was a pivotal moment because it's when many people stop trusting influencers, period. You couldn't trust an influencer's recommendation anymore because you couldn't trust that there wasn't an incentive. You couldn't trust that there was wasn't something behind them giving that positive review. And maybe not at this time, but I think we're at a point now where you would rather see someone that you follow and adore do a positive review with sponsored. Particularly creators that you really like. You're like, you want them to get that bag, you want them to be financially compensated for the content that you enjoy being able to consume for free. But back in the beauty YouTube days, kind of again, mid to closer to late 2010s, beauty became so lucrative that people started to be sellouts. We found out that influencers had been positively reviewing products that they'd either barely tested or were influencing people to buy. Stuff that we later found out was either fake or just shit. From then on, it added another layer. It went from being about the quality of a product to the trustworthiness of an influencer. What this birthed was drama channels and, and Beauty YouTube or the Beauty community as the term was coined for all of these big creators that seem to be friends with each other but we later found out weren't and kind of had all of these feuds online and you know, very iconic moments like Bye sister and less iconic moments that were just kind of catty and weird. The whole industry just started to have quite a negative connotation on YouTube and it became really, really messy and people just started become deterred from it. I mean we've seen Bretman Rock speak out about later that he just stopped creating beauty content because he didn't even want to be associated with the messiness of the creators that he'd grown at a similar time to white people ruin.
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The beauty community and I'm a go. It just became a money industry and like, it just became an ick to me. Like, ugh, when did beauty become so ugly?
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This was an industry at this point. It's the year 2017 and the ACCC in Australia launched an investigation into leading influencer marketing where they went back and started to crack down on influencers who weren't following the required regulations. And remember that footnote before about social proof and how followers were found to be the most impactful thing an influencer could have for their credibility? Well, in 2018, Facebook Instagram started to crack down on their policy against buying and selling Instagram and Facebook accounts. Facebook and Instagram consider buying or selling groups or accounts to be a violation because it leads to deceptive behavior, including misleading users about the true ownership of pages and groups. Additionally, such transactions can result in the misuse of data or misleading advertising practices. This fiasco led to the mass deletion of ghost social media followings. I followed so many influencers where it just felt like their followings halved or even people in my local community, people I went to school with. The ACCC themselves didn't join in on cracking down on this until 2021, where they launched an investigation themselves into influencers and companies that use fake followers or reviews to bolster their social media presence. The ACCC made it clear that misleading consumers through such deceptive practice could result in penalties. Under the ACL, the search term hashtag ad on Google increased by 900% between 2016 and 2023. The graph is pretty wild to see and I'll post that on Instagram, but it shows our growth in media literacy too. And we're becoming increasingly aware of this type of marketing and its implications. But the point of telling you all of this is to give you kind of a vibe check of where social media users were with influencer at the time. There was this general fed up ness that we had had with creators where we felt like we just couldn't trust them anymore and we were less interested in hearing from them. Big Beauty YouTubers reported that they were receiving less and less views. And then enters TikTok. This sentiment around influencers was vital to the success of TikTok because we didn't want to hear from people that we were following anymore because we didn't trust them anymore. Instead, we wanted to see everyday people's beauty reviews and give them the same opportunity for mass as influencers because those people didn't have that hidden incentive. Those people we could trust. And this flipped that product release cycle that we were talking about before where a brand would launch a new product, send it to an influencer, have already invite them on a brand trip so we know that they're going to talk positively about it. And it flipped all of that on its head because most of us didn't care if a product was new or old anymore. We just cared if it was good. It's always so interesting to see how brands respond to new social media platforms launching because at this point in time when, when TikTok kind of really took off in 2019, 2020, it still took a second for brands to take it seriously. Now it's the goal of many brands and they just chase the concept of a product going viral. We saw Peter Thomas Roth firming eye cream and that single review of an everyday woman showing how instantly it firmed under her eyes blew the product up the same way a review of a product from a really big creator would have years ago. We were now primed for learning about beauty online. We cared about the formulations of products, we cared about the percentages of ingredients in skin care and actives and skin barriers and all of this kind of comprehensive stuff that we had time for now. We cared for now because we enjoyed learning about products in that way. What I think was even more impactful of this time was that we now when TikTok came around for the most part, not entirely, but we had better developed media literacy skills so we could seek out qualify qualifications and credibility outside big numbers. This saw a rise in expert creators where we were very much more trusting of a makeup review from a makeup artist, for example like Patrick Ta or makeup by Mario, a skincare product review by a dermatologist like Dr. Shah with at derm doctor or a skin specialist with skincare by Hiram. I can't remember his exact qualifications, which is potentially a red flag. But all of these creators were very vocal about their qualifications because suddenly we wanted that expert knowledge, particularly in lockdown where we couldn't get to professionals, or again hair care product recommendations from someone like Chris Appleton. As our media literacy has gotten better, so has consumer safety law. For example, in 2022 in Australia, it became illegal for influencers to post about therapeutic products like sunscreen without proper approval approval. This regulation came from the TGA and the TGA requires influencers to follow strict guidelines when endorsing therapeutic products. Influencers are prohibited from promoting these products if they receive any form of payment or incentive unless the content complies with advertising standards. If influencers post about these products, they must not use personal testimonies and of course clearly disclose the commercial relationships using labels like ad or sponsor Sponsored. And while this act was really good for health related products kind of post the vegan paleo or Till 4 freely the banana girlification of the early 2010s that scarred many of us, sunscreen being included did feel like a step backwards for many people. Just blew my mind that a cosmetic product like a tanning cream or tanning solution that promoted unsafe sun practices was going to fall under easier regulations than than sunscreen. It shows that many of these regulations aren't perfect and many of these regulations need improving on, but the general direction is positive. Like in Feb of this year, afra, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, released an outline for a new set of regulations for influencers advertising non surgical cosmetic procedures. They stipulate that companies engaging influencers are responsible for ensuring compliance with all advertising regulations, including a ban on testimonials and prohibiting free or discrimination discounted procedures for promotional purposes. It is every woman's prerogative on her personal decision for cosmetic procedures, surgical or non surgical. But the promotion of that on social media where it's known on TikTok for example, I think the average user is 16 or something really really young and impressionable. That set of regulations is a good one and most of them are having stricter rules around sponsored and promotional content in relation to beautiful beauty is positive. And this use of hashtag ad and its evolution in advertising and marketing has drastically changed the beauty industry so gradually over the last decade that some kind of harsher terms coming into place and having to work backwards rather than being reactive would probably do a lot of good for the space. I also think that harsher regulations around these types of things force beauty brands that are reliant on positive reviews for a lot of their sales. It forces them to stay up to date with the regulations in every country that they do marketing and PR for, which is a net positive and creates again a really different dynamic than what we've had from the space. Traditionally influencing is great and content has so many benefits and I'm one of the biggest preachers and vouchers of that. But this growing power of influencer advertising has meant that we've had to watch so many average and crap brands enter the market and utilize this type of advertising for evil. This reduced barrier to entry to launch a beauty brand, as in it takes less capital because of the democratization of social media and, and the accessibility of e commerce. And all of those things have done a lot of good for the industry, but equally as much bad. Like we haven't even touched on drop shipping or MLMS today or all the other shitty beauty marketing schemes that the landscape has made so many of us victim to throughout the years. Years. It's a good thing that we are navigating this space now with so much more caution. And I'm sure that most of us can agree that as a consumer, those regulations getting stricter and stricter are quite comforting. But that does make it harder for marketers to navigate the space. And to that I'd say if you're a business or are launching a business that relies entirely on influencers, then the world probably doesn't need your product. And that is a problem if you want a way to quantify that. If you're launching a beauty business and are investing more into your marketing than you are your product or formula relations, you should probably check that out because there is so much innovation needed in this industry that that money would be better spent and a good product is going to drive so much more sales value than working with influencers ever will. And that is something that we forget because we hear so many stories about products going viral or the changing landscape in influencer advertising which isn't going anywhere and I'll touch on that in a second. And we so easily lose track of what's important, which is the efficacy of a product. It is not revolutionary, but we forget about it constantly. And the reason that happens is because most beauty businesses are built for a gap in the market from a marketing point of view. Charlotte Palomino, co founder and chief brand officer of Juskin, made a great video on this and spoke about how most brands are born out of problem solution marketing. She describes it as how they see a marketing gap, a messaging gap or an identity gap in the market market and they then create a product to fit it. So rarely is a product created out of the needs of your skin, hair, nails, etc. Essentially, they find the commercial opportunity first and then work backwards to create the product. Charlotte also talks about how brands are rarely founded by experts in their field. She says, how many cosmetic chemists are creating color cosmetic brands and then to add to that, how many dermatologists are creating skincare brands? I don't even know the word for a haircare expert like the person that specializes in hair, because I haven't heard about any of them because none of them are making founder content. It sounds so stupid but worry about your product first. Be concerned with your product over the marketing potential. There are so many gaps in the beauty market when it comes to needs for innovation. Instead we just get glossier repackaged hundreds of times with different brand colors and a new celebrity founder. It's so rare to actually see innovation and beauty now because again the barrier to entry is so low. It's so easy just to creator. You've got manufacturers that will create product for you with smaller and smaller MOQs which is minimum order quantity. We have so many brands repackaging stuff we've seen before. The two brands that are coming to mind right as I'm thinking of this as not being that and of really innovating. Firstly is Deeper skin. I don't think they've launched yet, but it's a fake tan brand for women of color. Genius. How has no one ever thought of that? How like literally how another brand is thick th I which has reinvented the anti chafe stick in saying that influencer advertising isn't going anywhere and despite what I've said today, it's not all bad. So my recommendations would again not groundbreaking. But firstly get familiar with the accc. If you're in Australia, the FDC in the US or the ASA in the UK with their guidelines. This is publicly available information and there are enough horror stories that should scare you off marketing blindly. Yet me included as a marketer I know so little little about what those regulations actually look like in this industry. I am scared about the amount that I learned through researching for this episode so I will link a bunch of resources down below to get familiar. If you're a larger brand, look at having someone like the Social Law co into your business for the day for a training day. It might be expensive but it could save you thousands. In my short four year career working in beauty marketing I have witnessed that many laws lawsuits. It blows my mind. I have zero affiliation with the social law code. I have zero idea how much they charge for a training day but I can guarantee you it is less than every one of those lawsuits. Brands need to move away from worrying about reach which is the number of people that will see or hear about your social media marketing initiative and move towards engagement which is worrying about the types of people that will hear about this initial initiative. I am acutely aware that this is not a groundbreaking concept but it is worth repeating. Such a huge part of the Social Media manager or Social media team's role within a company or in an agency is communicating and educating the people that you work with in your teams what these metrics and numbers mean to prove the worth of your spending. In short, what we've seen in the last kind of five years, we've moved away from what's known as network based algorithms, which is where you follow someone and you see all of their posts and the posts they choose to amplify, and towards recommender based algorithms, where a social media platform makes educated guesses on what you're interested in seeing, which means that anything could go viral. This is your TikTok, this is your reels. I want to do a whole other episode on how the change in algorithms has impacted beauty, but what it means now is, as we're all familiar, is that anything could go viral. But virality doesn't translate to sales. Brands need to focus on signaling to the algorithm that the product is relevant to a certain type of order. And how you do that as a brand is by getting your product in the hands of the people that have followings of that type of audience. If it's a skincare brand and it's about innovation through formula and there's a real education component, you need to be working with creators that are educating people on skincare formulation because your brand being associated with that niche of viewer is going to push you to more viewers that have interest in that type of offering. And that is the only way, with the mass, mass amounts of people that are on social media, you're able to get in front of of the right people, the people that are actually interested in your product. Because we're moving away from these vanity metrics. It doesn't matter if a video is getting 20 million views, but it's going to the wrong type of people that aren't interested in your product. And for influencers, it's the same recommendation. Stop chasing vanity metrics and worry about who is listening. If you've ever tried to link someone from your TikTok elsewhere, you will know the intensity of that drop off. And that concludes episode two. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love if you could share it to your Instagram story because you are my niche and getting in front of other people that care about whatever niche this is means so, so much and is the best way you can support this show carrying on. And I feel a common thread developing, I fear, because I feel like there was still so much I missed. So if you have any thoughts or questions, please send me a DM on insta or on TikTok Airface Media and otherwise. I will see you next week. Ciao for now. This episode was recorded on Ghana country. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders past and present.