As/Is

The challenge:

Re-brand BuzzFeed’s successful style and beauty verticals as an independent website with its own look, feel, and identity. Create a thriving space for style and lifestyle content, and develop a marketing plan that leverages unique premium branded products.

How we approached it:

• Highlight our core values: inclusivity, diversity, authenticity, and fun.

• Cultivate strong, relatable personalities that can make recommendations, star in posts and videos, and act as the brand voice.

• Offer spaces and opportunities for beauty junkies to congregate — on social platforms, and on O&O.

• Create an experience that has a consistent and elevated look and feel.

• Make readers feel involved and invested by creating content around the feedback they give.

My role:

• Developed editorial strategy and vision for newly combined style and beauty teams.

Collaborated with editorial and marketing to come up with site name, mission, and branding.

• Worked with sales team on our go-to-market plan and original ad products.

• Conducted research and exercises around our audience profiles and what problems we were solving for them.

• Aided our affiliate marketing team in designing an affiliate program for the site.

Results:

As/Is launched in spring 2018 as a destination site for anyone and everyone interested in beauty, style, and wellness. At its peak, our O&O and social platforms garnered more than
340 million pageviews a month and generated around $25 million a month in sales via affiliate links.

Learnings:

Audiences are looking for spaces to share recommendations, ideas, and reviews. They want coverage that’s relatable (and self-aware when it's being aspirational. They crave accessible and effective products, social trends, hacks, and experiences, and they want to feel seen and heard in the work you produce for them.

If you effectively do this, your audience will evangelize on your behalf, and become the mechanism through which your stories and videos are shared and disseminated. Trust is a key part of making a sale, and audiences are more inclined to buy products recommended by faces and users they trust.

Special Content Package: Body Week

Case study: Diversity and Inclusion documentation