YEAR:
2025
BRAND IDENTITY
CLIENT:
VANTA STUDIO, PARIS
IDENTITY · MOTION · CAMPAIGN
INTRODUCTION
Three audiences. One comment section. No labels.
Mary Kay's product doesn't reach the customer from a shelf. It reaches her through a person — an independent consultant who chose the opportunity and built a business around it.
That makes the feed do three jobs at once: keep millions of existing consultants active and proud, bring new people into the opportunity, and give customers a reason to try a product they've never picked up. Three audiences, arriving in the same place, wanting different things.
CHALLENGE
The three jobs weren't variations on one message. They were different arguments.
The legacy community needed continuous nourishment. Millions of consultants built this business, and they stay active when they feel recognised and equipped. Starve that feed and the engine slows.
New consultants had to come from somewhere. That's a pitch about a life, not a product.
And customers had to be given a reason to try. The opposite pitch — formulation, what it solves, why it earns a place in a routine.
Sitting on top of all three: a perception that this was a brand for your grandmother. That read doesn't just cost you Gen Z customers. It costs you Gen Z consultants, which is the actual pipeline.
Then the reporting surfaced the uncomfortable part. The opportunity content — the posts whose entire job was recruitment — was the weakest-performing content on the feed. Quarter after quarter it occupied the bottom of both the Facebook and Instagram rankings. Average view time on those videos sat at three to four seconds against a brand that was otherwise outperforming its category eightfold.
So the recruitment problem wasn't a reach problem. The content built to do the most important job was the content the audience skipped.
STRUCTURE
We stopped treating it as a messaging problem. Three tracks, each with its own surfaces, formats, and success metric.
Community. Facebook and the Instagram feed. Recognition, product news, assets built to be re-shared downstream by consultants to their own customers. Judged on comments and shares — conversation is what a healthy community looks like in the data, not reach.
Opportunity. TikTok and Shorts. Native, entertainment-first, no heritage framing, consultant stories told as stories rather than as pitches. Judged on non-follower reach, new-viewer percentage, and age composition.
Product. Reels, Shorts, and long-form. Demonstration over aspiration: application, tutorial, formulation-led explanation. Judged on saves, sends, and watch time — the signals that mean intent rather than approval.
The allocation wasn't a guess, and the audience data proved it. Across one quarter, long-form video reached an audience that was 3% aged 18–34. TikTok's was 55%. The same brand, the same accounts, an eighteen-fold difference in who was actually on the other side of the screen. One content approach could not have served people that far apart.
Behind the tracks ran the reporting cadence — weekly, monthly, quarterly. Each report measured every platform against its own assigned job, read audience composition underneath the headline numbers, and converted that into decisions for the next cycle. One of those decisions: start cross-posting short-form content to YouTube, a channel that had been treated as a long-form archive. That quarter it posted its highest engagement of the year.
Then the part most people skip. Three audiences arrive in the same comment section with nothing marking which is which. A consultant celebrating a milestone, someone circling the opportunity, and a customer asking whether a formulation suits her skin are three different conversations, and one brand voice fails all three. Replies were triaged by intent before they were written — peer recognition for consultants, a real next step rather than a sales pitch for the opportunity-curious, straight answers for customers. When a product question needed accuracy we didn't hold, we routed it to the right internal team and came back with a verified answer instead of a guess. The comment section was run as a support channel with an escalation path, not a sentiment exercise.
That proximity produced the finding that reshaped the mix: a customer's own video became the third most saved and most shared post of the year, outperforming nearly everything the brand produced itself. The people already inside the business were the most credible argument for joining it — and for buying from it. We stopped treating that as overflow and started commissioning for it.
RESULTS
The legacy community kept its home. The next generation found a door in — some as customers, some as consultants.
