Annual vlogging competition launches as beauty reviewers continue to dominate

Vlogging, where non-professional consumers post cosmetics product reviews onto the video sharing site YouTube, is an increasingly dominant platform within the beauty industry, with the clips of some personalities generating views into the millions.

The FACE awards seek to determine the ‘Beauty Vlogger of the Year on YouTube’, a title which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize and is voted for by consumers.

The continuation of the awards into their third year confirms the ongoing rise of the vlogging platform in the cosmetics marketing and retail space.

Social platform​

The rise of vlogging’s popularity participates in the increasingly social media–focused beauty retail landscape, which has seen consumers increasingly researching products online prior to purchase, in a trend dubbed ‘Informed Shopping’ by Datamonitor’s Ramaa Chipalkatti.

YouTube’s top 15 beauty vloggers now hold an average of 2.1 million channel subscribers each, and these numbers continue to grow: major brands, however, control only 3% of the site’s beauty video content of 14.9 billion views.

Recently some brands have been making moves to address this, with attempts to enter the vblogging world for themselves.

Brands stepping up to the mark​

Unilever’s new ‘All Things Hair’ channel, for example, looks set to prove a vblogging avenue for future video content for the company,  

“It’s much more engaging for the user and goes some way to competing against vloggers and other video content that features multiple products​,” observed Ashley Friedlein, CEO of internet data firm, Econsultancy.

In a similar move, in Taiwan recently, Google launched its first cosmetics advertising platform via its Google+ Shoppable Hangouts feature.

Described in Want China Times as “a combination of internet technology, social media and online shopping​”, the platform will function in a similar fashion to beauty vblogs, with footage of celebrities discussing cosmetics products.

On the right track​

Getting up to speed with the tutorial video model offers a key opportunity for beauty brands going digital, McGugan suggests, and one from which they can easily profit.

“Vbloggers are doing better [than cosmetics brands] because they’re being authentic, they’re delivering a benefit, and they’re pushing out regular content. These are solvable problems for major brands​,” states McGugan.