Ask for NARS'

Agency: Spotify with Vizeum and The Story Lab

Driving product trial is critical in the luxury beauty category. Two perennial pillars of NARS' growth strategy are to drive brand experience through its stores and use tactical sampling to drive conversion. Pre COVID NARS were set to embark on a campaign that drove beauty consumers into store. In a lockdown, this was no longer an option. NARS had to either completely cancel a major campaign in their marketing calendar or pivot, and quickly. Following Spotify's first party data informing the client that voice assistant usage had sharply accelerated and audio streaming had almost doubled compared to pre-COVID, they chose to pivot to a strategy that used voice assistant technology. SendMeASample sought to create Shiseido Beauty's first ever voice activated sampling campaign; Spotify Advertising encouraged listeners to ask their smart speaker to 'SendMeASample for NARS' and received samples of make up to encourage purchase intent. 'Ask for NARS' was SendMeASample's best performing campaign to date, with 32k redemptions in 15 days, smashing opt-in benchmarks at 4.5% vs. 1.5%.