Dive Brief:

• L'Oréal Paris is celebrating National Lipstick Day on July 29 with a major social media push designed to empower its audience, according to a company press release. The campaign prominently features a #ReadMyLips hashtag intended to bring the beauty brand's "Because You're Worth It" tagline to life, and also serves as the launch for its Colour Riche Matte Lipstick.
• Celebrity spokeswomen and social media influencers will all share their favorite shade of L'Oréal Paris lipstick around the event. Anyone using the hashtags #ReadMyLips and #lorealparis and tagging @lorealmakeup in their posts will also be aggregated into a "global platform," with select posts shared on L'Oréal Paris' social media channels.
• The beauty brand is actively encouraging those following National Lipstick day to shoot photos and video of themselves wearing its bold products while participating in activities that reflect that boldness, such as advancing a resonant message or promoting a cause, the release said.   

Dive Insight:

Brands leveraging relevant events and "holidays" to promote themselves is nothing new, but L'Oréal Paris' approach for National Lipstick Day this weekend does the double duty of encouraging user-generated content (UGC) and drumming up hype for a new product, the Colour Riche Matte Lipstick. The campaign is indicative of the value beauty brands put on social media, in paritcular, and L'Oréal Paris is incentivizing sharing by aggregating and then elevating posts that include messages or causes that followers of the brand want to spread the word about.

As smartphone camera quality has improved alongside the popularity of sleek, image-focused platforms like Instagram, getting users to engage with branded hashtags and share photos and video related to those hashtags has become more intuitive and creates higher-quality UGC. A major contributor to these trends is beauty brands' desire to chase young audiences like millennials, who have increased spending power coupled with a greater reliance on mobile experiences and social media interaction. 

L'Oréal took one of the top spots for digital marketing innovation in the hair care and color category in a recently released study from L2, which underscored the heavy emphasis the sector is pouring into mobile-optimized sites and digital marketing. The #ReadMyLips effort shows how the brand continues to put a focus on those tactics.