Advertising Project: Maybelline New York IMC Response Campaign "The city doesn't wait and neither does she"
Challenging Ephemeral Virality with Heritage, High Performance, and Human-AI Workflows
Role
Strategic Lead
Industry
CPG | Beauty
Duration
4 weeks
The Project
Modern consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing often faces a fundamental dilemma: chase the fleeting highs of viral trends or anchor down in enduring brand equity. Using e.l.f. Cosmetics’ high-profile, telenovela-style Super Bowl campaign featuring Melissa McCarthy as a catalyst, our team executed an AI-assisted agency sprint. Acting as agency partners to Maybelline New York (under the L'Oréal umbrella), the objective was to craft a rapid, high-impact competitive counter-campaign.
Crucially, this exercise was designed to pressure-test evolving modern agency workflows and integrating generative AI tools to accelerate production while anchoring the core strategic thinking in human critical analysis.
The Strategic Reframe: "Virality Expires. Identity Doesn’t."
e.l.f.’s strategy relied on rapid disruption that leveraged scripted humor, pop-culture telenovela tropes, and borrowed halftime-show cultural buzz. While effective for immediate social buzz and short-term shareability, borrowed cultural moments come with a steep expiration date.
Our strategic breakthrough was to avoid directly attacking or parodying e.l.f. (which only amplifies a challenger) and refuse to mimic their comedic tone. Instead, we positioned Maybelline as the unshakeable standard:
e.l.f.’s Angle: Chasing borrowed virality through entertainment and comedic drama.
Maybelline’s Counter-Positioning: Grounded in 110 years of New York grit, proven high-performance formulas, and earned self-assurance.
The Strategic Tension: e.l.f. is a brand that participates in culture; Maybelline is a brand that made culture.
The Campaign Platform: "No Drama. Just Edge."
To confront e.l.f.’s "Juicy Drama" narrative directly without mentioning them by name, we launched the counter-mantra "No Drama. Just Edge" alongside the primary consumer tagline: "The City Doesn't Wait. And Neither Does She".
Targeting young post-grad professionals and older Gen Z consumers (ages 18–35) seeking an established aesthetic and high-performance reliability, the campaign was brought to life through multi-format executions:
Urban OOH Domination: Massive Manhattan takeovers across iconic settings (Manhattan Bridge, SoHo, Financial District). We framed the visual narrative around three modern New York archetypes: The Writer (inspired by Sarah Jessica Parker), The Muse (inspired by Anok Yai), and The Founder (inspired by Alex Consani), symbolizing unscripted, fast-paced momentum that defines the city that never sleeps. We chose iconic celebrities that both had roots in New York Culture and Gen Z youth culture as a whole, particularly for Gen Z women.
Kinetic TV & Social Spots: Documentary-style visual assets capturing real skin, club bathrooms, late-night subways, and boardroom prep. Ultimately, highlighting Maybelline’s high-performance wear in raw, unvarnished city environments.
Human-AI Orchestration in Modern Strategy
As Strategic Co-Lead, I directed the research and creative prompts across Claude and Gemini, treating the models as collaborative junior strategists and production accelerators rather than autonomous decision-makers:
Strategic Interrogation & Redirection: Early LLM outputs defaulted to lazy parodies of e.l.f.’s humor. I actively steered the prompt architecture toward competitive positioning, brand legacy theory, and CPG value differentiation until the models justified why heritage beats ephemeral virality.
Rapid Asset Prototyping: Used text-to-image and text-to-video tools (Veo) to quickly generate visual proof-of-concepts, iteratively refining prompts to strip away synthetic studio gloss in favor of realistic skin texture and kinetic street lighting.
Workflow Key Learnings: Successfully demonstrated how brand strategists can leverage generative tooling to collapse weeks of initial creative brainstorming and moodboarding into hours, while underscoring that distinct brand identity still requires decisive human editorial control.
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