Since Peter Thomas Roth launched 30 years ago, the marketing landscape has changed. The brand once relied heavily on print ads. Now, for the second consecutive year, it is launching a celebrity-fronted campaign.
Last year’s campaign featured Lindsay Lohan in a commercial for the brand’s suite of under-eye patches. And in 2014, the brand featured “Gossip Girl” actor Kelly Rutherford in a print ad. But historically, Peter Thomas Roth has featured its namesake founder in its advertisements.
On Thursday, Peter Thomas Roth launched another celeb-anchored campaign — this one tied to its most popular franchise, the Water Drench collection. It stars Kyle Richards of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and her daughter, Alexia Umansky. One jar of Water Drench Cloud Cream is sold every minute, according to the company.
Last year, it was Lohan who initiated the campaign-focused partnership, said Ryan Roth, founder and owner Peter Thomas Roth’s son and manager of the brand’s influencer and brand partnerships. “She was a [dedicated] user of our eye patches,” he said. “We sent her so many eye patches over the years that I was convinced she was eating them — she was going through them so quickly. So it was a great opportunity to tap into her organic obsession with PTR.”
But the company remained wary of identifying with an influencer-focused strategy. “It can be a real turnoff to some consumers, and we have to stay true to who we are: We’re a clinical skin-care brand and all about efficacious products,” said Sarah McNamara, Peter Thomas Roth’s evp and gm.
The partnership proved successful. McNamara said the company saw a 30% lift in sales in the three months following the campaign, compared to the three months leading up to its launch. And beyond sales, the campaign was a hit, Ryan Roth said. “[People were] getting excited about it [across generations],” Roth said. “[Lohan] knows no age, and she is timeless and iconic.” The brand tapped Robyn DelMonte (aka @GirlBossTown, 665,000 followers on TikTok) for a paid post in which she stitched Lohan’s ad and gave it her “stamp of approval,” noting that she loves nostalgia in ads.
Ryan Roth said that, like Lohan, Richards has long been a fan of the brand’s eye patches. “[Richards] wore them on [“The Real Housewives”] a couple of years back and spoke to it on social media, so we had a sort of metric to be able to measure the success of the campaign before it even launched.”
“When I was filming, we’d go on these vacations and they’d come into my room with the cameras, and you do not want to be seen that early after a night of drinking and not sleeping with your eyes all puffy. So I started using the [Peter Thomas Roth] under-eye patches. I was like, ‘I can never travel without these patches again. I literally cannot be seen without them.’ And it became a thing where the girls would come into my room and be like, ‘Do you have the eye patches?'” Richards said via Zoom.
Meanwhile, Umansky has been a fan of the Water Drench collection, he said. In the ad, which will run across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and programmatic search ads, Umansky introduces the collection to her mother.
“For a very long time, it was mothers telling their daughters what to do with their skin care. And now, with the rise of TikTok, it’s the Gen Z and Gen Alpha [daughters] who are telling their mothers what to do,” Ryan Roth said, pointing to the ad’s content.
Both Richards and Umansky will post the video on their own social platforms. Richards has 4.3 million followers on Instagram and Umansky has 499,000.
Of the goals for the campaign, McNamara said, “We will definitely achieve brand awareness, and I think we will [also] see a lift [in sales]. … Nobody spends this kind of money without seeing some kind of immediate lift and impact.” The brand declined to comment on both its investment in the campaign and annual revenue.
