Summary

A recent WWD feature gathered executives from E.l.f. Beauty, MAC Cosmetics, Liquid I.V., David Protein, and Maybelline to discuss a shift in how beauty and wellness brands are approaching marketing in 2026. Rather than leading with celebrity-fronted campaigns, several brands are integrating products directly into entertainment content — TV shows, streaming series, gaming, and creator culture — often before that content becomes popular. One example cited: Liquid I.V. was written into the script of a hockey-themed series months before the show became a breakout hit. The resulting campaign reportedly generated over 7.8 million impressions and more than 23,000 new followers across platforms in a two-week period, and an accompanying print ad reportedly sold out within a minute. E.l.f. Beauty’s marketing lead described the company’s approach as a “flywheel” model, coordinating digital, paid media, social, CRM, creators, and PR around roughly 130 campaigns a year, with campaign ideas partly shaped by ongoing analysis of consumer comments.

Analysis

The shift described in this piece is unlikely to be explained by a single cause. A few contributing factors seem to be converging at once:

Audience attention has become harder to hold with traditional formats. Shorter attention spans and market saturation are cited as pressures pushing brands away from campaigns fronted only by well-known faces. This does not necessarily mean celebrity marketing has stopped working — it may simply mean it no longer works well on its own in a crowded feed.

Entertainment content offers a less “ad-like” entry point. Product placement embedded inside a show’s narrative can feel less like a paid interruption and more like part of the story, which may explain the higher engagement numbers reported. That said, the article also notes growing consumer frustration with product placement that feels random or forced — suggesting this strategy can backfire if the fit between brand and content is not credible.

Coordination across channels appears to matter as much as the entertainment tie-in itself. The “flywheel” description — paid media, social, CRM, and PR working in sync rather than independently — suggests that entertainment integration alone may not be the primary driver of results. Isolating how much of the reported engagement came specifically from the entertainment placement, versus the surrounding coordinated campaign, is difficult to determine from the available information.

A structural limitation is worth naming directly. Every brand mentioned in the source article — E.l.f. Beauty, MAC, Maybelline — has substantial marketing budgets and in-house teams producing over a hundred campaigns per year. Whether this entertainment-integration approach is realistically accessible to small or independent beauty brands, which typically cannot secure early access to a show’s script or production timeline, is not addressed in the source material and remains an open question.

What This Might Mean for Smaller Brands

Smaller beauty brands may still be able to apply a scaled-down version of this logic — for example, partnering with independent creators who are producing episodic or serialized content, rather than trying to access mainstream TV production. Whether this achieves comparable results is not established by the available data, and would require separate evidence to confirm.

Sources : 

wwd.com