YouTube Leans Into Its Live Shopping & Short-Form Video Ambitions With Beauty Festival 2022
Source: YouTube
YouTube is bringing back Beauty Festival, its beauty-dedicated digital festival on June 16th. The festival will feature top creators, celebrities, and beauty industry insiders going live for product drops, how-tos, and reviews. Over 40 beauty brands will be included in the activation. For the first time, the entire event will be shoppable, with viewers having the ability to purchase products through YouTube’s live shopping features.
Ahead of the event, YouTube is launching its first-ever Shoppable Shorts Challenge with Glossier for its exclusive, never-before-seen No. 1 Pencil eyeliner. Led by musician Kehlani, creators can participate in the challenge by sharing Shorts with the hashtag #WrittenInGlossier. All content with the hashtag will be shoppable via a link directly on the video.
YouTube continues to lean into its live shoppable and short-form video ambitions. The Beauty Festival will be another opportunity for it to test and learn. With a powerful line-up of creators and brands, viewership will likely be high and will result in a positive ROI for participating parties. Depending on how successful creators and brands determine the event to be, it could be another pivotal step in YouTube helping to increase the adoption of live shopping in the U.S.
The success of the Shoppable Shorts Challenge is also something to pay attention to. Despite Shorts racking up over 30 billion views per day, there hasn’t been any indication as to whether or not Shorts can drive the bottom of the funnel results for creators or brands in the same way TikTok has. With users being able to shop products from Shorts content shared as part of the challenge, we will get a better idea of the value of Shorts, especially in the context of brand collaborations.
In just a few days of the challenge being live, there are already hundreds of videos and creators participating. This challenge structure with the e-commerce tie-in could be enticing for brands that want to create user-generated content at a scale that viewers can also take action on.
