Campaign Spotlight: Michael CeraVe
When Charlotte Tansill and her team at Ogilvy marketing agency set out to create a viral, Superbowl-worthy campaign for CeraVe skin care, they started by developing a conspiracy theory.
“We did what we always do and turned to social listening for inspiration,” Tansill told Glossy. “We found some Reddit posts from over seven years ago where a couple of people were sort of surmising if there was a connection between Michael Cera and CeraVe. We immediately saw the potential.”
The firm’s breakthrough creative moment came next. “This led us to our big idea: To plant and spread a rumor so that we could debunk our own rumor and reveal the product truth, which is that CeraVe is developed with dermatologists, not Michael Cera,” Tansill said.
The idea, along with others, were prepared for a pitch for the L’Oréal-owned brand. But first, the Ogilvy team had to convince Michael Cera.
The actor, fresh off his role in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” had only ever accepted one brand deal at the time, with UberEats. But Tansill said he was “quite excited” about the opportunity, minus one big part. “Michael doesn’t have social media; he doesn’t even have a smartphone,” said Tansill. And joining social media to disseminate the campaign was a nonstarter for the actor. “What sort of started as an immense challenge [with Michael not willing to join social], sort of turned into a big opportunity for us,” she said.
CeraVe’s team at L’Oréal loved the concept and were willing to invest millions, including the $7 million-plus needed to advertise for 30 seconds during the Super Bowl.
“We designed this as a four-week long campaign where we planted and spread the rumor and the conspiracy [just three weeks before the SuperBowl],” Tansill said. “Our hearts were beating fast. … I mean, we knew we had really strong creative content and an incredible story to tell, but you don’t know how the internet will respond until it drops.”
As detailed by Glossy in previous reporting, the team carefully planned out a campaign rollout strategy that included social content created by various influencers during the two-day Super Bowl commercial shoot with Cera.
“Typically, you might have your big idea and then leverage the press to amplify that idea,” Tansill said. “We sort of did the inverse: The press and the media were the storytellers, not the amplifiers.”
This included an interview with Bobbi Althoff for her “A Really Good Podcast” where Cera refused to confirm nor deny the conspiracy. There was also a video by Caleb Simpson, known for his TikTok home tours, that peeks into Cera’s movie trailer without the actor’s knowledge only to find stockpiles of CeraVe.
“We wanted to create a circle of content where people could sort of peripherally watch the story unfold, or they could dive deep and go down the rabbit hole,” Tansill told Glossy. “So we meticulously planned and rolled out hundreds of pieces of content over those four weeks.”
Traditional media was used to fan the conspiracy’s flame before blowing it out. It included a January 26 Page Six story titled, “‘Superbad’ to skincare influencer: Is Michael Cera the mastermind behind Cerave?” which featured paparazzi photos that had been planted by Ogilvy on Reddit. The pictures featured Cera carrying large plastic bags of CeraVe products on the street in New York.
Then, on February 7, four days before the Super Bowl, Ogilvy squashed its own conspiracy theory with a “New York Times” article titled, “No, Michael Cera Is Not the Mastermind Behind CeraVe.” The article, which detailed the entire campaign from end to end, had been planned since day one.
The campaign has been hailed as one of the most impactful in years. During the Canne Film Festival this summer, it received 10 Cannes Lions awards, including the Grand Prix award. It’s also received three D&AD Yellow Pencil advertising awards and the 2024 Super Clio award for creative excellence in Super Bowl advertising.
Tansill’s team tracked 32 billion earned impressions, 15 billion of which were before Super Bowl Sunday, and collected more than 2,000 earned pieces of media coverage. During the campaign, Google search traffic for CeraVe was up 2,000%, and Tansill told Glossy that CeraVe sales also spiked.
Tansill has worked at Ogilvy for more than 16 years, starting as an executive assistant in 2008, and is currently the president of PR, social and influence in the firm’s North America office in New York City. The firm also operates in the U.K.
CeraVe was launched in 2005 and acquired by L’Oréal in 2017. The brand has successfully reached a new generation of shoppers through social media since the start of the pandemic. CeraVe currently has 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 1.6 million followers on TikTok, where its educational content has garnered more than 8.3 million likes. The campaign commercial is the brand’s most viewed TikTok post with more than 3.5 million views.
“Our clients [at CeraVe] are obviously incredibly brave because the story is being told from other voices. So often, brands want control [in messaging],” Tansill told Glossy. “This is a lesson in the value of loosening the reins and co-creating with your audience.”
