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If you can’t beat ’em, entertain ’em.
Tower 28 has made a big push into scripted social this year, first releasing the sketch comedy series The Blush Lives of Sensitive Girls in the spring to promote the release of its GetSet Blush. Now, the makeup and skin-care brand has followed it up with a series on Instagram and TikTok that encourages people to join a casting call to become one of its models for an August 2026 product launch campaign, as well as other potential future campaigns. The casting call, as well as the series promoting it, focuses on people with skin conditions like eczema, acne, and psoriasis, and the series shows characters going through the audition process much like the real-life applicants.
With the final episode of the latest series now out and applications for campaign auditions closed as of November 1, Alex Kalatzis, director of marketing and communications at Tower 28, told us that the brand saw more than 4,000 sign-ups, which exceeded its goal fourfold. The applicants, she said, will hear back on final decisions by the end of the year.
We spoke with Kalatzis about the brand’s latest social campaign and why it’s continuing to go all-in on scripted comedy as a marketing vehicle.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tell me about how the performance of Blush Lives influenced the decision to make another scripted social series with this latest campaign? What we saw back in March was that our audience really resonated with this high-production content trend. We had never done anything like it before, and I think it had strong entertainment value; the characters, the humor, it all hit. Some of the performance we saw from that exceeded our expectations. We were 37% above our average engagement. It was the most-shared content of that period and also the most-viewed content of that period, so that was definitely a key driver in our decision to test skits again.
In this case, the goal and KPI were a little bit different. Blush Lives was about announcing a new product franchise and really speaking to the POVs of the product, whereas this skit was meant to drive sign-ups to our first-ever nationwide open casting call. Essentially, we needed a vehicle for mass reach and word of mouth to spread, so we took a pretty big swing with our first-ever full-page New York Times ad, and then to amplify it further, the second big swing was testing our hand with another content series. The intention here was to use entertainment to take a somewhat basic announcement and turn it into something fun…It was an opportunity to deliberately evolve the format…We tried to make the content feel a little bit less produced than the first round, which had more of a commercial value. This was meant to feel a little more iPhone, but it wasn’t [shot on] iPhone. [The skits] are a bit shorter in length. Humor-wise, we took a lot of inspiration from The Office…but there was more of an emotional connection to the audience here. More wholesome, sweet, come-as-you-are, step-outside-of-your-bubble message.
What do you think it is about this serial, comedic, highly produced content that is resonating with your audience? We had never done anything remotely like it [with Blush Lives], so I think that was new and different, which caught our community’s attention. Everyone’s looking for entertainment more than being sold to directly, so I think from that perspective, it hit.
The premise of the latest social series is about a character auditioning for Tower 28’s casting call for a product launch campaign next year, which is actually happening. Tell me about the real casting call and what that looks like. We tried to use a lot of the parameters for application within the skit. We made fun of the fact that one of the characters in the second skit was applying a ton of makeup, thinking that’s what she needed to do in order to submit her application. But in our New York Times ad and in the qualifying notes, it says, “We want to see you as you are. We want to see bare-faced, natural skin.” So it is meant to explain how to apply within those skits.
Are you capturing content as part of the actual casting call and putting out any reality-type serial content as part of the campaign? We haven’t figured out Part 2 yet…but I would love to do some sort of MTV [style] behind-the-scenes, “making of” [content], showing the journey of the people that we end up casting in our future campaigns.
Do you have any indication of what’s driven the most sign-ups of those 4,000+ applications? We do, because one of the application questions asks where they found out about the casting call, so we saw that around half of our audience came through Instagram and the other half was email, SMS, etc. Then a scattering of people came from the New York Times, word of mouth, that sort of thing.
What do you see as the benefit of recruiting talent from the general public, as opposed to taking the traditional route and working with professional models? One of the biggest inspirations for launching this initiative was that we have a really challenging time casting models that have real skin conditions, and that’s something that’s really important to us in terms of brand DNA and authenticity…We actually worked with an influencer named Jada [Jones], who we met at the National Eczema Association Expo last summer, and she was going through topical steroid withdrawal. When we launched our most recent product, our GoGo Shimmer sticks, we cast Jada in the campaign because she has active eyelid eczema. The response from our community was so strong…we’re sure that what we’re doing right now is going to really resonate.
Having done Blush Lives and this other series, what are your next big aspirations in scripted content? We’re actually cooking up a series right now that we think could be a through-line in our marketing next year. Essentially, we’ll be introducing a suite of characters that you’ll see throughout the year and use them as a way to debut new launches, whether it’s merch, [or] interesting brand campaign moments. We’re figuring out what that might look like and what the cadence of that would be, but that would be an opportunity to even bring in bigger names or faces.
For marketers interested in doing scripted, comedic social content of their own, what would you say are the best use cases? For us, I would never want to overuse this. I think it’s best used sparingly for those moments you really need to cut through. In the case of Blush, we were launching during a very competitive time, there were a number of blushes launching at Sephora, some even in very similar packaging, so we knew we needed to do something really different. In this case as well, we’ve seen casting calls before, but we wanted to do something that really captured the attention of the sensitive-skin community. We use this as a tool when we really need to stand out.
Do you see this as the future of reaching people as social media audiences become more savvy and averse to branded content or traditional ads? Ultimately people will stop and watch whatever speaks to them. If you have perfect skin or you are incredibly camera-shy, you probably didn’t stop and engage with this content, which is totally fine. It was meant for a very specific subset of people, but I think no one really wants to be marketed to in a traditional way anymore. Everyone’s seeking entertainment value.
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