When e.l.f. Cosmetics ran a regional Super Bowl ad starring Jennifer Coolidge in 2023, beauty brands and sports weren’t typically considered members of the same team.
Almost two years later, that’s starting to change, with more beauty and personal-care brands tapping into sports and leagues of all kinds, including the NFL and the Super Bowl. In 2024, the biggest football game of the year included ads from brands like CeraVe, NYX Professional Makeup, and e.l.f., which upped its regional buy to a national spot.
Some marketers expect to see more from the category in the 2025 game. While e.l.f. hasn’t announced any plans yet, the brand’s Super Bowl ad last year came together in less than three weeks—and Chief Brand Officer Laurie Lam said that “anything is still possible.”
Super Bowl or not, e.l.f. is sticking with sports marketing in the year to come, Lam said, including for its latest campaign, which is all about sports fandom.
“When you see the signals in there, you see that those proof points are working, you go in harder,” Lam told Marketing Brew. “You’ve got to walk the walk. You’ve got to show up.”
Sports primer
In its latest campaign for Power Grip Primer that rolled out in late November, Lam said her team wanted to build on its work in sports while continuing with the message that its primers are “entertainingly sticky,” which started in the regional Super Bowl ad where Coolidge gets a shower door stuck to her face. That ad generated more than 60 billion impressions and resulted in about a 90% increase in traffic to the e.l.f. website during the week it debuted, according to Lam.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, how the hell do I top sticking a shower door to her face?’” she said.
The e.l.f. marketing team settled on the rituals, routines, and superstitions that often surround sports fandom, which resulted in “eyes. lips. face. fandom,” an ad starring actor Joey King as a superfan who never takes her team face paint off—even when she’s meeting the parents of her boyfriend, played by Lucien Laviscount, for the first time.
The ad didn’t debut during a sporting event. Instead, it first aired during the 2024 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which saw a record audience of 31 million viewers on NBC and Peacock. It also ran against college sports including the Rose Bowl quarterfinal, across OTT platforms, and during Hallmark’s Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, Lam said.
Start your engines
There are a couple of reasons why e.l.f. continues to embrace sports marketing, according to Lam. For one, it ties into the company’s aim to “champion the underdog” and “level the playing field for everyone,” she said. Much of the brand’s prior sports work has been with women athletes like tennis legend Billie Jean King and British racing driver Katherine Legge, and e.l.f. is also a founding partner of the Women’s Sports Audio Network, a joint venture from Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment and iHeartMedia.
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In November, the brand served as a sponsor of the Billie Jean King Cup in Madrid, Spain, kicking off a multi-year partnership with the women’s tennis tournament, and in May, e.l.f. said it became the first beauty brand to serve as the primary sponsor of an Indy 500 driver in Legge. At that event, the brand set up a “lip oil change” for attendees to try its Glow Reviver Lip Oil and put on a drone show celebrating Legge.
E.l.f. also keeps showing up in sports because the strategy seems to be working: The Indy 500 activation generated 7 billion impressions for the brand, with “very positive sentiment,” like comments from new customers saying they were planning on buying e.l.f. products for the first time, according to Lam. The “eyes. lips. face. fandom” campaign has already resulted in similar interest, with some people messaging the brand asking for prequels or sequels to the ad, which does exist in longer form on YouTube, she said.
While Lam didn’t confirm whether e.l.f. is planning a Super Bowl moment in February, she did say one thing is for sure: The brand isn’t backing away from sports—and its mission-driven work in the space—anytime soon.
“E.l.f has never done a logo slap” she said. “As long as I’m chief brand officer, that will never happen.”
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