By the end of 2024, the skincare market in the UK alone is predicted to reach $24.36 billion, and standing out in this crowded market is an ever-growing challenge. While social media has made it easier to whip up a PR storm, for real staying power, tried and tested products and clear brand messaging have the best potential for success.

It’s an approach taken by L’Oréal-owned skincare brand CeraVe. The brand was set up in 2005 with dermatologists and has continued to create products and develop formulations backed by science. Three essential ceramides (specifically ceramides 1, 3 and 6-II) form the basis for many of its products, and it’s where the ‘Cera’ comes from in CeraVe.

While it had grown steadily over the years, it wasn’t until L’Oréal acquired the brand in 2017 that it began to grow more rapidly. Coming to the UK and other global territories helped amplify its presence, but it was a combination of the pandemic and CeraVe’s consistency in reminding its customers what it is that really saw the brand explode and be named as the number one skincare brand for Gen Z in 2023 (by investment bank Piper Sandler, via its semi-annual Taking Stock With Teens survey).

“Our customer base for CeraVe was strongest with boomers. They’d go to their dermatologists and CeraVe would be recommended, but now dermatology has become more accessible through TikTok and other platforms,” explains Adam Kornblum, global chief creative of US brands at L’Oréal. “We were one of the first brands to work with dermatologists as influencers back in 2019, and then during the pandemic, derm influencers were becoming super-popular and we just happened to already be working at that level.”

Through a desire for genuine skincare advice rather than the ‘gifted’ endorsements of influencers they followed, young people were suddenly tuning in to dermatologists who were creating content around CeraVe’s products.

It’s a very straightforward, accessible brand. We’re fun and approachable but at the same time clinical and educational

Part of the brand’s charm is also its relatively plain branding and packaging design – something many other brands have now adopted. Its latest iteration was created by Utah and Hawaii-based design studio Goal and aims to reflect CeraVe’s “approachable personality and clinical foundation”. Minimal colour palettes, simplified typography and clear labelling make the products easily navigable and align with the more reasonable price point.

“It’s a very straightforward, accessible brand,” says Kornblum. “We’re fun and approachable but at the same time clinical and educational…. [Our packaging] helps us show who we are, and who we’re not.”

This almost ‘anti-design’ approach has meant there’s been room for CeraVe to be more playful in its advertising and marketing. Having already built a captive audience on social (the brand has over a million followers on both TikTok and Instagram), and opting for a social-first approach, has meant CeraVe has been able to mix the informative with the more light-hearted, playing into social trends and working with popular creators.

This year also saw CeraVe take its brand message to new heights via its first ever Super Bowl campaign. The brief for Ogilvy PR was to create a viral “360 immersive campaign that was earned-first and social-first”, and culminated in a spot during the game.

We found a Reddit post from seven years ago, where someone surmised if there was a connection between Michael Cera and CeraVe, and that really inspired us

The campaign featured film star Michael Cera taking credit for creating the CeraVe brand, simply because they share the same name. The idea was to spread this ‘rumour’ ahead of the Super Bowl, with the final ad allowing CeraVe to dispel the gossip and get its brand message out there that “he didn’t develop CeraVe. Dermatologists did.”

“We did what we always do, which is turn to social listening, so we were looking for insights from our audience and culture,” explains Charlie Tansill, North American president of Ogilvy PR, social & influence. “We found a Reddit post from seven years ago, where someone surmised if there was a connection between Michael Cera and CeraVe, and that really inspired us. We thought maybe we could create a conspiracy and pretend that Michael Cera created CeraVe.”

The idea was brilliant, but incredibly specific, as it all hinged on Cera playing the part. “He doesn’t do a ton of brand work, but he really loved the idea and the opportunity to work with CeraVe,” Tansil says. “One challenge was that not only does he not have social media, he doesn’t have a smartphone. Typically, when you contract a celeb, you have an expectation that you’re getting distribution within social, particularly when you’re trying to create a social-first campaign.”

However, Cera’s “loveable personality”, and the fact that he was culturally relevant due to his offbeat performance as Allan in the Barbie movie, was enough to convince everyone that it would work. “Michael is serious but funny, and CeraVe is the same way. CeraVe has been building this funny personality with creators over the past few years,” says Kornblum. “So it all actually made total sense from a value standpoint.”

We wanted to create an immersive experience that rolled out over time, that our audience could be a part of, not just listen to

Humour was the backbone of the campaign and this continued with the other social media influencers they engaged with. “We wanted to make sure that the content was funny and made you smile. And that could be everything from a hero influencer asset that we created with Caleb Simpson or Dr Shah, down to the community management and the one-to-one engagements. We carried that tone through everything we did,” notes Tansill.

Other activations saw Cera carrying and signing CeraVe products in fake paparazzi shots posted on Reddit, “because all conspiracies fall out of subcultures”, plus the brand partnering with influencers from different categories, as well as IRL elements. What brought everything together was careful timing. “We wanted to create an immersive experience that rolled out over time, that our audience could be a part of, not just listen to. So we started the campaign four weeks before the Super Bowl, all with the intent to spread a conspiracy,” she explains. “In those phases of the campaign we weren’t using any paid media, because it needed to feel organic.”

The second phase of the campaign was enlisting CeraVe’s dermatologist partners to start debunking the rumours on their channels. “It was a counter to your typical playbook for the Super Bowl – normally you release a teaser the week before the commercial is released to maximise exposure. No one saw our commercial before the Super Bowl. But before it even aired, we had around 15 billion earned impressions. The commercial was just the icing on the cake.”

The campaign has since won multiple awards, most recently the Social and Influencer Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. To have the industry recognise the idea and embrace “a new era of marketing” has been exciting, but as always it’s about the customers. “Ultimately, we created it for our audience. We had goals for the campaign, we knew we had a really good idea and great content, but for us it was about how much it resonated,” says Tansill.

CeraVe has since followed up with more films that target its Gen Z base, including a rom-com trailer-style ad created by 180 Amsterdam. The One Under The Sun takes all the classic rom-com tropes and applies them to the protagonist’s search for the best SPF. In July the brand also released Cleanse like a Derm by 72andSunny, a spoof of old-school daytime soap operas, to dissuade customers from using hand soap and instead use a cleanser from CeraVe, which once again utilises the brand’s “edutainment marketing”.

“It’s definitely not just about views; it’s always about the messaging,” says Kornblum on not getting distracted by the hype around its campaigns. “As long as we hold true to making our product and brand messaging fun, then I think we’ll stay close to the heart of what we need to do. The [Super Bowl spot] displayed exactly that, which is something fun, immersive and so on brand, as we’re literally telling everyone what CeraVe stands for.”

cerave.com