Beauty By Design: 5 Tips for Creating Beauty Brand Commercials that MOVE People
Amid a global beauty industry expected to top
in 2025, consumer brands face a crowded, highly competitive landscape. Unsurprisingly, the marketing of these products is everywhere – a colorful sea of messages and touchpoints vying for the consumer’s eye. How does a beauty brand produce commercials that actually stand out? And even more important, how do those visuals actually MOVE their target audiences?As a motion design and production
often serving beauty brands, this is a question we seek to answer for our clients on multiple levels, since our work quite literally is about movement. To get to the heart of it, however, begins with asking these brands a few questions of our own.
What to Know Before the Creative Process Begins
For instance, what kind of problem are they looking to solve? Are they lacking awareness? Or needing a revenue bump? Is this public facing or B2B? These answers will focus our efforts to really drive home success.
It’s also about considering the commercial’s specific use. Are we driving excitement or educating? Are we communicating what it’s like to use the product in a vibey sense or really nailing down RTBs. Questions like these lay out a more focused direction for how we approach the visuals and feels. Oftentimes, commercials fail when trying to accomplish too much.
As a shop, we’re dedicated to making the best piece possible, pushing boundaries to make incredible, marketable art for our clients. There’s nothing that takes the wind out of the sails quicker than trying to load too much into a piece. When the feedback comes in that there needs to be more text on screen, we’re headed towards an iceberg.
Mobilizing Your Beauty Brand Commercial Through Storyboards
To avoid scenarios like this altogether, we are often commissioned to do storyboards and creative concepting (or what we call mobilization), which really helps align on what the creative actually needs to be.
Clients may be tempted to skip this step, but it’s crucial they do not! Even the storyboards roughed out in-house (good, bad or anywhere in between) are better than going without, since we can review and recommend changes. On the other hand, being forced to “roll with it” means knowing it may turn out lame, which no one wants!
The key is to get production people involved in the creation of beauty brand commercials earlier in the process. If clients have trusted us to create something beautiful, there’s probably knowledge to be gained about our ideas on the process or even pieces to get to that desired result.
Once we get our questions answered and are mobilized into a more thoughtful and cohesive direction, we can then incorporate several best practices into our motion design and video production. Here are our tips for creating beauty brand commercials that move you:
Attention to Details
Texture can be extremely important for motion design. For example, graphic designers pour their hearts into label and package designs. These materials and textures need to be nailed! Foils, embossing, metallics… everything requires attention to detail. Even a simple varnish texture and how it's ever-so-slightly raised at the edge, like a clear polyurethane would dry. It’s these “flaws” that fool the eye into thinking it’s real. Your brain will register the smallest detail, even if you’re not consciously aware it’s happening.
Transitions
When storyboarding, we try to consider transitions early on. Having a meaningful way to go from scene 1 to scene 2 can reinforce the beauty brand and/or ideas you want to portray. Maybe it's a play off the logo or label art. Or maybe it's something about the "reason-to-buy" that makes a meaningful transition. There are creative ways to make your piece more impactful than simple hard cuts.
Color Palettes
For quite a while, pastel colors dominated; they still kinda do. But we're seeing a change to more drama – deeper blacks, richer tones, etc. – that is likely to be the trend for the next couple of years. People often love seeing those moody, dramatic pieces, but brands and designers don't like seeing their work so dark. It's really something they should trust us with -- we know what looks good!
Additionally, since most things are in motion for us, many of the stills come from the animation/motion design, which is great. You want all your content to be cohesive. You don't need to hire separate agencies to create different campaign materials. This is especially important when considering color.
Infusing Luxury
Perhaps against your initial gut, you should keep things minimal and clean. Don't try to overload the scene with too much. For example, a simple, large softbox to sculpt the light around your product is often the prettiest way to go. A glow behind the product also goes a long way, especially if it's glass! Think beauty brands, as well as
. Remember, those label specials mentioned earlier (foils, embossing, texture, hot foil stamps, etc.) all go a long way to show the craft and how premium something is. You don’t need to go crazy with lighting or motion to convey a premium vibe.
Pairing Visuals with Music
No matter how gorgeous your visuals are, music choice drives the feel of a piece so much that picking the wrong track can really throw off the vibe of luxurious or premium. We recommend using a high-quality production music library where song rights are covered by your licensing fee (“royalty free”) so you can experiment/license tracks. Taking that a step further, the better music libraries out there allow you to download stems that can really craft the emotion of your commercial, which is paramount to making something feel premium.
Embracing these best practices has not only been crucial to our motion design success in creating commercials for high-profile beauty brands, but it has also freed us up to truly enjoy the process. We’re designing for new products using bleeding-edge tech where appropriate, and it's some of our most stunning work (I'm biased). We also love that beauty work can take on so many genres.
Ronny Young is founder and president of
an award-winning motion design and production studio filled with talented, scrappy creatives who have way too much fun transforming concepts into moving visual reality for major consumer brands and entertainment entities.