Martha's first-ever beauty campaign. Built on a signal the brand was afraid to use.
One Aunty archetype. Five TikTok-native formats.
The Aunty archetype anchored the system. Aspirational. Irreverent. Impossible to scroll past. Five formats deployed the voice. ASMR Product Ritual for high-fidelity tactile moments. The Recipe for narrative building. The Hero for the cultural thirst-trap anchor. The Advice for whisper-tier authority. The Aunty for the psychographic payoff. Every cut ran platform-native ad logic invisibly inside in-app features.
Gen Z was not looking up for aspiration. They were tracking #Aunties and #SilverFox as platform-native shorthand for a liberated archetype. Not an age label. A psychographic: take-life-by-the-horns energy. The same signal showed up in the 60+ audience — retirees, second-act founders, women in reinvention. Different age, same hunger. The spark was an organic Martha post the internet had already coined a "thirst trap." HAUS OF SÔS did not manufacture the moment. We recognized the signal and built a creator-native architecture around what was already earning trust. Whalar engaged HAUS OF SÔS — the production company Ashley co-founded — to lead senior, end-to-end execution. The mandate was speed without sacrificing craft, and luxury performance without losing platform truth.
The numbers the campaign actually put up.
The campaign outpaced the prestige makeup market by ten points and pulled in twelve international honors. Ad Age Creativity Awards (Best ROI). Cannes Lions. Shorty Awards. Clio Awards. The Drum Social Media Awards. Campaign BIG Awards. MMA Smarties North America. Streamy Awards. CMA International Content Marketing Awards. PR Daily Content Marketing Awards. The lesson the industry kept missing: TikTok is where luxury trust sells. Even at $75.
Signals, not briefs.
The Martha campaign did not begin with a brief. It began in 2021 when HAUS OF SÔS started tracking two hashtag clusters Gen Z was building inside the platform: #Aunties and #SilverFox. A liberated archetype Gen Z could not get from their parents. By the time Clé de Peau Beauté called, the system was already proprietary IP.
#Aunties cluster emerges.
HOS begins tracking a Gen Z fixation on women older than their parents — open-minded, self-expressed, culturally rich. Not nostalgia. A liberated archetype Gen Z could not get at home.
HOS Pulse · Tracking#SilverFox archetype tracks across the same audience.
Same psychographic. Men and women older than parents, living lives Gen Z wanted to grow into. Niche community of influence the platform was actively rewarding.
HOS Pulse · Building thesisMartha posts her Summer Selfie.
Poolside. Unposed. The internet went feral. Coined it a "thirst trap" and crowned Martha a sexy beauty icon. HOS did not manufacture the moment — we had been tracking the archetype for eighteen months waiting for the right operator to embody it.
HOS Pulse · Signal confirmedClé de Peau Beauté calls.
Brief: launch on TikTok. Hero: the iconic — and iconically expensive — concealer. Most agencies would have run discovery for six weeks. HOS arrived with eighteen months of cultural research already locked. The strategy was the IP.
HOS Pulse · Strategy lockedThree pulse points hit. Approval collapses 5×.
Relevant cultural moment. Fresh take on native platform visuals. Formats selected to showcase Martha's diversity. To kill ambiguity at approval, HOS pre-recorded every concept using a co-founder as the stand-in. Transitions, language, edits, native cues all visible. Approval timeline: 14 business days → 2 business days.
HOS Pulse · System shippedHOS writes the script with Martha.
Authentic personality + rarely-seen character are non-negotiable on creator-led work. HOS sat with Martha directly to write each script in her voice — her flair, her confidence, her humor. No celebrity-reads-our-copy risk. No translation layer.
HOS Pulse · Voice lockedThe brand-owned posting guide ships with the assets.
HOS handed Martha's social team a posting playbook calibrated to FTC paid-partnership compliance and platform native guidelines. Every detail accounted for. Launch went flawlessly. No takedowns. No reposts. No PR risk.
HOS Pulse · Risk eliminated43+ organic press pieces. The trail blazed itself.
Performance media's default is to boost everything. HOS read the signal: organic momentum was carrying further than paid amplification could buy. Result: forty-three-plus organic press pieces and counting. Earned media a paid plan cannot manufacture. The campaign moved into the cultural jetstream and stayed there.
HOS Pulse · Trail blazedThe HOS proprietary formula for asset success.
Three pulse points must land before HOS will ship a creator-led asset. We do not negotiate with the Pulse Points. The campaign that breaks the cultural jetstream is the campaign that hits all three.
Pre-Validated Signal.
The trend already lives on the platform. We track it before the brand has a brief. We arrive at the kickoff with the strategy already proven.
Platform-Native Visuals.
Assets are designed for the platform. Not adapted to it. The audience reads the content as native before they read it as ad.
Multi-Format Dimensionality.
One archetype. Five formats. ASMR, Tutorial, Clone-Trail, Recipe, Hero. Each cut surfaces a different dimension of the operator. The audience sees the person, not the placement.
Five execution moves that compound the formula.
Every HOS asset ships with the operating system that runs it.
Every HOS deliverable arrives with a brand-owned Posting Playbook engineered for FTC paid-partnership compliance, platform-native upload settings, and algorithmic optimization. The social team posts the work without us in the room. Zero takedowns. Zero compliance escalations. Zero PR risk on launch day.
The Posting Playbook is the deliverable a CFO can audit.
- FTC-compliant paid-partnership disclosure language for every post
- Platform-native upload settings to protect asset fidelity at launch
- Algorithmic optimization toggles aligned to the asset's intent
- Risk-mitigation rules · what to disable, what to delay, what to never boost
- Drop-window scheduling tuned to the audience's verified active windows
- Escalation protocol for comment moderation + community management
The deliverable was a decade of compound IP.
The Martha Pilot opened the spine. Clé de Peau Beauté integrated the HOS system into the brand's operating infrastructure across three vectors. Portfolio Expansion · the Eye Cream launch and the Before & After multi-brand series. Global Scalability · two regional renewals and multi-year licensing extensions. Infrastructure · a 2025–2027 Two-Year Continuation Agreement currently in market. Procurement-grade receipt: the brand approved the work. Then bought it back. Six times over.
The campaign moved into the cultural jetstream and stayed. Forty-three-plus organic press pieces — and counting — across trade, mainstream culture, beauty, and academia. A selection below. None of these were paid placements. None of these were pitched as part of the contract.
"From concept to execution, your team went above and beyond to exceed our expectations. They are incredibly creative, clever, thoughtful, resourceful, and collaborative. It's no easy feat to shoot two brands with different creative needs during the same day and deliver assets that served our specific needs. Your team knocked it out of the park and provided us with elevated content that's informative, unexpected, and relatable. Their work has become synonymous with creative excellence for our leadership team and we can't wait for our next exciting project together. Ashley, Captain, and Coco. Aka our Dream Team."
What you are actually buying when you engage HAUS OF SÔS.
Most creative shops sell hours. HOS sells a system that arrives with cultural research already done, approval cycles already compressed, operating documents the brand keeps, and a relationship that gets renewed. Seven receipts from the Clé de Peau engagement that translate directly to procurement math:
Faster approval cycles
14 business days → 2 business days. Pre-record system kills ambiguity at approval. One round with client leadership. One with talent. Done.
Organic press pieces
Earned media a paid plan cannot manufacture. The campaign moved into the cultural jetstream and stayed.
Cultural research, pre-brief
HOS arrived at the kickoff with eighteen months of #Aunties / #SilverFox tracking already done. No discovery period. No "let me think about it" call.
Not creator-adjacent
The co-founders are creators. There is no translation layer between agency and talent. The script reads in the operator's voice on day one.
Brand-owned posting playbook
FTC and platform compliance built into the deliverable. The social team posts the work without us. No takedowns. No reposts. No PR risk on launch day.
Boost decisions, not boost defaults
We read the signal before we touch the spend. Organic momentum carries further than paid amplification when the signal is right. Media spend optimized, not maximized.
People on set
We shot the Martha campaign with five people on set. The industry comparable for celebrity-led luxury beauty TikTok production at this scale is eighteen to twenty-five. Most of what other shops bill is the overhead they need to manage their crew, not the work they ship to the brand.
Billable engagements from one original brief
The original Martha campaign. Additional licensing on the assets. The Eye Cream concept. Two regional renewals. A two-year continuation agreement signed for 2025–2027. The procurement read: they bought it back, then they bought what came next, then they signed multi-year.
The moment the internet caught up.
Scripts pressure-tested with Gen Z focus groups before production. Filmed with Martha on a luxury set built to her tempo. The five pieces shipped together across TikTok and Instagram, calibrated to the platforms native enough that paid felt like organic, organic felt like culture.
TikTok is where luxury trust sells. Even at $75.