Prescriptives, Inc., a division of Estee Lauder Corp., has launched a video campaign to promote its mascara, with four videos featuring Jillian Veran, a makeup artist and the director of artistry for Prescriptives, offering makeup tips as she applies mascara to a model.
The videos, which run at a Prescriptives site and YouTube, began playing September 28 in association with the introduction of a new mascara.
The videos, which run a little longer than a minute each, feature humorous dialogue from Veran as she applies the makeup. “They wanted it to be lighthearted and instructive,” said Renée Torrière,
casting director at Shadow Casting/New York, who oversaw the production of the videos, which were shot by Glenn Schuster, who runs Industrial Strength/Montclair, NJ, a production company.
Sari Sternschein, e-commerce director at Prescriptives, said the videos are being utilized to highlight four mascaras that are used to create different looks. “The purpose is to help customers find the perfect mascara, while providing them with expert tips to get the look, using coordinating products, such as eye color and eye liner.”
Schuster said the videos were shot in hi-def with a Panasonic HVX200 camera. “We shot directly to cards, off loaded it to a laptop and backed up the files on hard drive,” he said. “Once it was backed up, we reformatted the cards and continued shooting. There was no videotape involved.”
He said, “They wanted to keep the videos light and the makeup artist had a fun personality. They were amused by the outtakes and the ad lib moments, so we kept them as bloopers.” The bloopers appear at the end of some of the videos.
The videos are intended for “any woman who wears mascara or even the woman who is intimidated by mascara and needs expert advice,” Sternschein said.
The videos are part of an exclusive online campaign for the products. “Since mascara is such a cult product for women, we have chosen to focus our advertising efforts completely online,” she said.
This is the first time the company has used online video advertising. “Video is an amazing asset for us because a consumer can see a product in action, how it applies, what the effect is on the skin,” she said. “It’s a more interactive shopping experience for any customer that researches a product online before shopping in-store.”
TikTok Creators Left In Limbo As Supreme Court Considers Potential Platform Ban
Will TikTok be banned this month?
That's the pressing question keeping creators and small business owners in anxious limbo as they await a decision that could upend their livelihoods. The fate of the popular app will be decided by the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on Jan. 10 over a law requiring TikTok to break ties with its Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, or face a U.S. ban.
At the heart of the case is whether the law violates the First Amendment with TikTok and its creator allies arguing that it does. The U.S. government, which sees the platform as a national security risk, says it does not.
For creators, the TikTok doomsday scenarios are nothing new since President-elect Donald Trump first tried to ban the platform through executive order during his first term. But despite Trump's recent statements indicating he now wants TikTok to stick around, the prospect of a ban has never been as immediate as it is now with the Supreme Court serving as the final arbiter.
If the government prevails as it did in a lower court, TikTok says it would shut down its U.S. platform by Jan. 19, leaving creators scrambling to redefine their futures.
"A lot of my other creative friends, we're all like freaking out. But I'm staying calm," said Gillian Johnson, who benefited financially from TikTok's live feature and rewards program, which helped creators generate higher revenue potential by posting high-quality original content. The 22-year-old filmmaker and recent college graduate uses her TikTok earnings to help fund her equipment for projects such as camera lens and editing software for her short films "Gambit" and "Awaken! My Neighbor."
Johnson said the idea of TikTok going away is "hard to accept."
Many creators... Read More