Why the Shane X Jeffree collaboration was the best and worst marketing campaign in 2019

Picture: Shane Dawson via Twitter

If you haven’t heard about the Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star/Jeffree Star Cosmetics collaboration, have you not been online the past six weeks? The famous long-time YouTuber has been collaborating with makeup guru/CEO and Youtuber Jeffree Star on his latest series ‘The Beautiful World Of Jeffree Star’, in the attempts to show a year-round look at the Youtuber beauty community and the behind the scenes of how a makeup eyeshadow palette is created.

Why it was the best marketing campaign of 2019

Both Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star were incredibly business smart to come up with this marketing concept of producing a makeup and merchandise line using Shane’s name and Youtube channel to promote the products to his (as of this date) 23 million loyal subscribers.

The series followed the pair discussing numbers of how much potential money could be made from this collaboration, it was interesting to see the hidden part of the beauty world. Jeffree Star explained how the costings generally work per item and the profit margins, subtly naming/slamming brands such as Too Faced who collaborated with Youtuber NikkieTutuorials to create a palette, she received a nice lump sum of $50,000 while the palette went on to make profits of $10,000,000 giving her a 0.5% cut of the profits.

During the series, Shane asked his fanbase on Instagram if they would prefer more business or drama. Fans claim drama won while others say there were two polls and both drama and business won one each. This is where the issues started to begin but we’ll get onto that later.

Shane took this as a time to re-edit and remove the awaited teased drama that was shown in the trailer which he promoted on his channel. This drama if you’re not in the Youtube world being between Youtubers and Beauty Gurus, James Charles, Jeffree Star, and Tati Westbrook. I won’t explain here what happened, simply Google and you’ll be flooded and can form your own opinion. The reason Shane’s fans wanted the drama included was due to the strange ending of it all with Jeffree and Tati both stepping down and apologising after James Charles proved many of the allegations to be false. Shane being new to the beauty world and being involved (James Charles mentioned Shane was speaking behind his back) would have been an interesting watch to see how Shane and Jeffree reacted to it behind the scenes.

The pre-launch and palette reveal video was a nice almost emotional watch but by this point, nothing from the trailer apart from essentially the marketing for the infamous palette was mentioned in the series. This is why it could be considered the best marketing campaign of 2019, with millions of viewers per episode (who potentially may have been only waiting for the juicy bits), were witnessing this product form from sketches to a real product. You see Shane and Jeffree discuss shade names, designs of the packaging and between episodes hyping the products on their social media platforms making the products trend on Twitter regularly. This gave the viewers an emotional attachment to the product, the feeling they were there for the creation so of course, they want to own it. It was the best advertisement I’ve seen for a make up product.

It was incredible to watch two people using digital media to form the biggest hype for a product I have personally seen in years. It reminded me of the first Yeezys or Kylie Jenner’s beauty launches… But bear in mind these are both mainstream celebrities, Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson are both self-made. I applaud them.

They tested the interest by releasing a merch line with essentially 24 hours warning, it sold out all immediately with little marketing. They knew at this point, they nailed it and probably agreed no drama should be included incase it risks sales.

Now jump to the release day of the makeup, they deep down must have been confident it will be a success. Jeffree Star claimed that there were over 1 million palettes to be sold along with a lipstick line, lip gloss and makeup accessories. They sold out in close to 24 hours, this included all platforms selling having major server issues with the traffic numbers and crashing causing massive delays in the purchase.

To summarise, this could be considered the best marketing campaign for these factors:

• The collaboration idea in the first place to produce the products

• Over 15 million views per episode, higher than most TV shows

• Sold out 1.1 million products (Not including merch or lipsticks and accessories) in a single day

All from social media marketing through the channels Youtube, Twitter and Instagram, Shane alone would have profited over $10,000,000 for simply putting out 6 videos and his name on a product… Woah.

Why it was the worst marketing campaign of 2019

I’m sure after reading above you’re thinking how could there possibly be negatives? From a profit point of view, there are zero negatives but from a marketing point of view... There’s a lot… And they are major.

Shane made the decision to cut out the long-awaited beauty drama from his series, this wouldn’t have caused so much frustration to fans if he didn’t include it in his trailer originally.

This has caused an influx of negative comments online for both Shane, and Jeffree on their Twitter, Instagram, Youtube account and even on Reddit.

The inclusion of drama and other clips in the trailer such as a potential house break-in would have enticed fans with zero interest in the makeup industry to watch and keep watching in hopes of seeing what they’d consider, the interesting parts.

The drama was even mentioned during the first episode teasing fans of what’s next in the series. A few more episodes are uploaded of let's face it, heavy marketing for the Jeffree Star Cosmetics and the soon to be released products… By this time it was clear by the timeline that Shane and Jeffree had decided to remove the teased drama. Fans were now somewhat already emotionally invested in the products, many tweets saying “I don’t even wear makeup but I want to buy it”, simple marketing manipulation and the feeling of FOMO.

Everything content-wise was incredibly well planned to shine Jeffree Star in a bright light, he’s had a lot of controversies against him in the past. The two dramas that were mentioned in the series was the NikkieTutorial X Too Faced drama which was an easy opportunity for Jeffree to promote how fantastic he treats his own clients.

The other drama was with Shane’s soon to be Sister in Law, Morgan Adams, after she traveled on a beauty influencer trip to Hawaii and felt pressured by the other influencers to get filler/wear more make up, etc. The series filmed Jeffree speaking with Morgan at his pink mansion and showing the human side of Jeffree, it made him look very nice. We know this was an opportunity for Jeffree to score back points after the big Tati/James Charles bust-up earlier on in the year.

This series certainly came across as a six-hour ad, with a mix of no upload schedule, last-minute changes causing many hours of delays. Fans, although becoming annoyed were still giving the series a chance up to the launch date episode, after being promised nine episodes and only having six so far.

This is where the major f*ck up happens.

The palette sells out and the launch day simply put was a disaster from a consumer point of view, customers waiting up to 3 hours of refreshing the page to try and snag one of the palettes. Fans were charged multiple times from servers not being able to keep up with the influx of traffic which was leaving customers oblivious whether their order went through successfully. Shane was responding in my opinion immaturely by claiming he screamed down the phone to Shopify to fix the issues with the servers, incredibly unprofessional and doesn’t shine a good light on Jeffree Star Cosmetics to boast about that to his millions of followers.

By this point, fans are unhappy by the episodes so far and the absolute mess that was the launch day. Yes, they sold out but it wasn’t an easy ride for fans. A week pasts and Shane has put out no videos, simply ‘liking’ any palette compliments. Jeffree at this point was promoting that Shane was working on the final episodes and hinted that drama will, in fact, be included, which is strange considering he was pretty rude to a fan the week before on Twitter for asking when the drama footage was coming.

Shane, following this did a 45 minute long Instagram live video expressing how he feels the sixth video should be the final, his prelaunch video. It came across almost like manipulation to guilt fans that he feels pressured to include content in he doesn’t want included and to continue on with the series even though he doesn’t want too. If it was stopped now, it would be incredibly strange, like an unfinished story if you don’t follow them on social media... Did it sell out? Was it a success? What were the numbers?

The live video did come across incredibly entitled considering the money Shane just made, he clearly cannot understand how the series simply comes across as a massive advert so far and how wanting to stop the series as soon as the product sells out looks incredibly shifty to a lot of his fanbase. It felt uncomfortable that a multi-millionaire filming from his LA mansion was trying to gain sympathy for struggling with his one project of the year to fans who most likely work 40 hour weeks, worry about bills to pay and have bigger concerns than editing and uploading a video. It didn’t sit right with many fans, understandably. An incredibly badly planned marketing strategy.

Shane announced on November 12th that there will be one more episode that he’s still editing, this didn’t go down well. The fans replies are incredibly honest, a couple of examples below.

“Disappointed in this series. I thought it was going to be all about the world of Jeffree Star. His life is insane and I would have loved to have seen EVERYTHING that went on this past year. This felt like it was nothing more than a huge promotion for your palette.” - @Cxllum5690

“Imagine a new TV show was airing... They advertise a great trailer and you get excited... You've waited a full year for this show... It airs... They're missing half the scenes from the trailer. How would you feel? You'd think it was unprofessional.” - @miaow1939 

“You know what I don’t get? You kept saying you were filming for a year, but then we don't even see all the footage and we don't even get the promised 9 episodes. I also feel like you weren’t even fully prepared for this series because you edited things in and/or out 1 hour before the episode aired? That’s very unprofessional in my opinion. Also, the trailer is very clickbaity, since we don't get to see half of the things that were IN the trailer. My point is, this whole series feels like a huge ad for your palette, and a lot of people including me feel very let down” - @Tweet_tw00t

Today, fans are mixed on the series and many continue to share their disappointment of feeling essentially fooled into buying the palette.

My thoughts, I think both Jeffree and Shane are incredibly smart to think of this idea considering the insane profits made. From a marketing point of view, I feel they didn’t have enough (honest) people checking the videos beforehand to see how it could come across as an ad instead of an insight into the beauty world.

An issue which makes me believe this was a badly thought out marketing campaign instead of documentary series, the lack of negativity made it feel incredibly fake. Nothing was negative about Jeffree Star Cosmetics or Jeffree, a true documentarian would have questioned negative areas of his company, such as his lack of environmentally friendly packaging for example. Limited information, in reality, was provided about the beauty world and it felt rushed and almost obvious the areas shown of how a product is made (Simple choice of palette colours linking to Shane’s life, basic marketing/design meeting about the palette) which to me did make it feel like this was a huge marketing campaign for Jeffree Star Cosmetics and massive cash grab opportunity for both.

What are your thoughts on the Shane x Jeffree marketing collaboration? 

Written by Robbie