This is an episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the beauty and wellness industries. More from the series →
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What does it take for a beauty campaign or brand to cut through the noise in 2025?
Our second-annual Glossy Pop Awards is one place where our team recognizes the best and most culturally relevant beauty and fashion campaigns, people, products, and brands.
In today’s episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, we welcome three esteemed beauty executives to discuss the secret sauce behind their Glossy Pop Award-winning campaigns.
These winning campaigns drove audience engagement, generated buzz and successfully met their set business goals.
To start, host Lexy Lebsack welcomes Leslie Ann Hall, founder and CEO of Iced Media. She and her team partnered with hair-care brand Moroccanoil to launch the brand’s first fine fragrance. The teams at Iced Media and Moroccanoil executed a campaign that levered social media for awareness and sales. They took home the Glossy Pop Award for “Best Use of TikTok.”
Next, Lebsack sits down with Dana Paolucci, head of PR and influencer at Unilever-owned Dove North America. Paolucci and her team worked with communications firm Edelman to take home two Glossy Pop Awards for its Dove x Crumbl cookies body-care collaboration. They won “Best Product Launch Campaign” and “Best Community Engagement Strategy.”
In our final mini interview, Lebsack welcomes Nilofer Vahora, Amika’s CMO, to discuss the hair-care brand’s “Best Use of Video” award win for its Superfruit Star Lightweight Hairstyling Oil launch with marketing company January Digital.
But first, Lebsack is joined by host Emily Jensen to discuss this week’s top beauty and wellness news.
Squishmallows, the TikTok-famous plush toy brand launched in 2017, made headlines this week for its foray into fine fragrance. Squishmallows parent company Jazwares, a Florida-based toymaker that was purchased by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway in 2022, has tapped longtime beauty executive Joel Ronkin, current founder and CEO of Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie hair care, to lead the project. The scents launched at Ulta Beauty this week in two sizes, priced $38 and $58.
Lebsack and Jensen also discuss rumors that beauty conglomerate Coty is looking to sell heritage mass color cosmetics brands CoverGirl, Rimmel and Max Factor.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop is also in the news this week for the closure of its 2-year-old mass beauty experiment, Good Clean Goop, which sells under-$40 skin care through Target and Amazon. The duo discusses the closure and what it means for masstige skincare.
Finally, the hosts walk through Amazon’s new ambitions in K-Beauty with this week’s launch of a dedicated storefront. It’s a smart move considering the rise in popularity of K-Beauty products and the stunning sales on the channel. To wit: K-Beauty is growing three times faster than Amazon’s average beauty category.
On Iced Media and Moroccanoil’s ‘Best Use of TikTok’ win:
Leslie Ann Hall: “The nice thing that TikTokShop does that’s really hard to replicate on other channels is collapse that user journey where you can kind of have awareness, consideration, transaction and then even that loyalty loop happening in one single action or one single moment. And that’s really what happened here. So on launch day itself, we flooded TikTok with all of this amazing creator-led content, both from affiliates on TikTok Shop and some of those fragrance mega creators, and, as a result, it created this unbelievable demand. I think the thing that was really unexpected for us was beyond just the tremendous success we had on TikTok Shop [because we also had] the brand’s strongest performing week to date [because of] the halo effect we saw at retail. So when you think about that consumer journey, we oftentimes at Iced Media talk about the power of TikTok not just to transact on Shop, but based on understanding that the consumer is going to buy where it’s most convenient for them. We sold out on Sephora.com in 24 hours and it was the No. 6 top-selling skew across all categories at Sephora in that first week.”
On Dove x Crumbl and Edelman’s ‘Best Product Launch Campaign’ and ‘Best Community Engagement Strategy’ wins
Dana Paolucci: “Community engagement was actually at the core of this launch. We knew that the Dove community and the Dove lovers were going to buy into this collaboration. … They’ve been asking us for these more gourmand sweet fragrances for a very long time. So as we were approaching the strategy for this, we knew that we actually had to win over the Crumbl community. The Crumbl community has their own behaviors, mechanisms and rules, and we became very obsessed with studying those before we launched. And so a couple of different ways that the Crumbl community operates: New flavor drops are on Mondays, so you see long lines outside of the Crumbl store. … There’s always speculation leading up to Monday, so a ‘leaks strategy’ was a huge part of our campaign, and is very much part of Crumbl culture, [because] they leak flavors on Reddit, and on social, there are Crumbl superfans that speculate what the new flavors are going to be. And then the last one is a lot of the content that’s created for Crumbl is done in cars. … They literally get their pink box, go into the car, and they review [the new cookie flavors] right there. We wanted to be able to engage the community in these authentic ways with our launch. … We dropped a lot of things on Mondays. We leaked the news on social and on Reddit. We DMed superfans. We also leaked it on Walmart.com, so we didn’t announce it. We just started. It just started populating Walmart.com a month before we actually launched. And then a lot of our creator content took place in cars, so [social media content viewers] thought they were getting a Crumbl review, but you were really getting a Dove x Crumbl review.”
On Amika and January Digital’s ‘Best Use of Video’ win
Nilofer Vahora: “With Superfruit Star, we wanted to tell that [story] in a fresh, cultural way [because] this product isn’t just another oil. … It’s packed with benefits for stronger, smoother, protected hair. So, because it was a real innovation, it gave us permission to go bold. We loved the idea of turning those benefits into ‘superpowers,’ and it was brought to life through playful superhero visuals and nostalgic pop art cues. …. I think it really worked because it didn’t really feel like an ad; it felt more cultural. Campaigns that are really resonating today in beauty are the ones that bring in humor and nostalgia; they’re not afraid of being a little bit bold and blurring the lines between entertainment and commerce. It really broke through because the product itself is also really innovative. Superfood Star isn’t just another oil, it’s this multitasker. And our loyal customers have been asking about it, so it gave us the confidence to be disruptive and to go big, both in creative and in media. We were smart about the distribution: We had longer storytelling edits on YouTube and CTV, and we had these quick, creator-led cuts on TikTok and Meta, so it was emotional, cultural and high-performing all at once.”
