Usually, cosmetic brands just want to sell cosmetics. But e.l.f. Beauty’s “So Many Dicks” campaign has a different goal.
The effort, which launched late last year and is still running, aims to increase diversity by reducing the overrepresentation of “Dicks” on corporate boards across the US.
There are twice as many men named Dick – including variants, such as Richard, Rich and Rick – on boards as there are Hispanic women, and 19 times more than there are Native American women. These gaps reveal a wider pattern of limited representation among minority groups on corporate boards.
Based on these insights, e.l.f. partnered with contextual intelligence platform GumGum to strategically reach board members and corporate leaders to encourage change.
The ‘it’ factor
Regine Fung, e.l.f.’s associate VP of global media, told AdExchanger that e.l.f. wants to “double the rate at which women and people of color are added to boards by 2027.”
That’s quite a lofty goal.
But e.l.f. is committed to the cause. The beauty brand’s own board of directors is made up of 67% women and 44% diverse members – a drastic departure from broader corporate America, said Fung, where only 28% of public company board seats are held by women and 74% of public company directors are white.
E.l.f. believes its inclusive board contributes to its success, Fung added, including its 27 consecutive quarters of net sales growth. Its mission now is to convince other companies that diversifying is worth the effort.
To accomplish this, the brand determined that contextual advertising is the best way to reach high-powered executives through the content that they’re already consuming with messaging that both resonates and provokes.
Right place, right time
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Contextual advertising allows brands to reach people with messaging that aligns with the content they’re consuming and with their mood.
GumGum’s Mindset Graph aims to go a step further by using AI to analyze real-time signals from the open web, including audio, images and URLs, to identify the optimal moments, topics and environments where ads will resonate the most.
The tool predicts the best placements by combining this information with audience insights and historical campaign data, such as which targeting and creative has been most effective for specific audiences and verticals. It’s as close to a “real time, live” understanding of a person’s mindset as you can get, said recently former GumGum CMO Kerel Cooper.
For example, GumGum can determine a viewer’s likely mood or perspective when consuming certain content, like fear during a suspenseful scene in a movie or excitement while reading an article about a sports team’s recent win. GumGum is able to analyze content at those hyper-specific moments, rather than judging by broad strokes, like a URL or a movie’s genre.
Spreading the word
But e.l.f. also wants to reach business leaders in places that might be less intuitive, Fung said.
GumGum’s Mindset Graph can help uncover what Cooper referred to as “subcultures or subcommunities” within a brand’s audience by analyzing the content they engage with. For example, when working with a luxury jewelry brand, GumGum found that its audience ranked unusually high for an interest in beekeeping. That insight helped the brand find unlikely content that its audience was likely to engage with.
In e.l.f.’s case, GumGum determined that sports content performed best for the “So Many Dicks” campaign, with a 2.44% click-through rate.
The fact that sports content did so well is a good reminder that “leaders don’t just read the business section,” Fung said. “They live in the same cultural moments as everyone else.”
(Indeed. One of the best-performing ads ran against an article about which “Love is Blind” couples made it through season eight.)
Bigger isn’t (always) better
Rather than just chasing impressions, Fung said, e.l.f. places its ads within content where audiences are likely to be more receptive to engaging in thoughtful, provocative conversations.
But, although the campaign’s messaging is “bold,” she said, the goal isn’t to shock people; it’s “to resonate, not disrupt.”
As one might expect for a campaign with “Dick” in the name, the messaging caught the attention of its target audience as hoped.
GumGum used its Creative Attention Tracker to identify exactly which parts of the ads captured the most attention by noting the points where users clicked, paused or scrolled down.
For example, the tracker helped e.l.f. determine, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the line “It’s okay to be a Dick” in GumGum’s Hang Time ad unit – a full-screen ad unit that aligns with the user’s scroll – drove the campaign’s highest pause rates and interactions. (The rest of the message is: “We just need to make room for other people.”)
Change is a gradual process. But e.l.f.’s contextual targeting brought the conversation directly to “key decision-makers,” said Fung, and “invited more people to rethink what leadership looks like.”
