#ShowUpBold

L'Oreal USA wanted to evolve its brand communications, connect with the next generation of beauty consumers and build brand love, working with retailer Ulta Beauty on what the agency describes as L'Oreal's first multi-product creator-led TikTok campaign. Beauty brands built on traditional communications need to earn attention on TikTok, where users and the algorithm favour creative, relatable content over polished advertising. Back to school is a visible moment of self-presentation, and Socially Powerful positioned bold, colourful cosmetics as the way students could express themselves within it.

The idea was to harness the combined brand power of Ulta Beauty and the L'Oreal portfolio to own back-to-school looks through the #ShowUpBold challenge. Twenty influencers launched the challenge on TikTok, supported by Instagram content, community management and paid media, asking users to post a colourful, expressive back-to-school look under the hashtag. Ulta Beauty featured as the retail destination and the L'Oreal portfolio as the products behind the looks, presented together rather than as separate advertisers.

A retailer and a brand portfolio can share one campaign when the creative device is a behaviour rather than a product claim, and anchoring the message to a fixed calendar moment gave the work urgency without a product launch. The challenge ran on TikTok with Instagram support. Socially Powerful reports 137M views and more than 4M engagements from 20 influencers, but every figure comes from the agency's own page, no launch date is given, and there is no sales or brand-lift data to assess commercial effect.