Work

If a client’s main directive is “we need to be wowed,” what do you create?

Paul Mitchell Advanced Education, one of our longtime clients, wanted to completely revamp its organic social strategy. The nationwide network of more than 100 franchised cosmetology/barbering schools gave us some straightforward but ambitious guidelines: a concept that was new, bold, and sexy; that appealed to the school’s target audience; that leveraged user-generated content (UGC) from Paul Mitchell Schools’ students, teachers, and alum exclusively; and increased national visibility of the Paul Mitchell School franchise brand.

And yes, it had to wow them.

With those guidelines, Ideas Collide developed “Bold & Beautiful,” a smart and daring campaign that blossomed far beyond the client’s social media channels.

Content and Communications Strategy Manager Laura Bjerk began with researching brands that resonated with Paul Mitchell Schools’ target audience — Gen Z-ers and younger millennials who follow trends and want to start their next chapter — figuring out which of these brands had effective social strategies.

Style blogs also became an important resource as Bjerk developed our initial strategy.

Meanwhile, she researched TikTok’s trending topics and content consumer reports to determine what Paul Mitchell Schools’ audience was really looking for.

Bjerk then turned to Ideas Collide’s design team. Her initial direction: create social graphics and strategy with unlimited creativity — no restrictions, no guidelines, no wrong answers. What would you do if you had full freedom?

Ideas Collide began a deeply collaborative brainstorming process, honing three strategy pitches to impress the client, increase audience engagement, and utilize lots and lots of UGC. From this collaboration, “Bold & Beautiful” was born.

Some of this campaign’s core traits:

• Monitors and responds quickly to changing trends
• Mixes vibrant, original graphics with dynamic UGC, making each social post a “scroll-stopper”
• Employs graphic treatments with simple shapes and big typography set against black backgrounds, so colors stand out while still blending with a phone’s “dark mode”
• Uses video and animations/illustrations wherever possible, leveraging the increased power and reach of social video content
• Creates day-to-day continuity (and long-term variety) through a rotating monthly color palette

Simply put, it looks great in a feed and in the grid.

“So the feed itself was going to be very, very beautiful,” said Bjerk. “We were going to work on creating pictures that work together to tell a full story for the month by being the same color, the same aesthetic. But the posts were bold and powerful enough to stand alone if you were just scrolling through your feed. … I want all of them to still perform on their own.”

Within the Paul Mitchell network, UGC is an ample resource: Hairstylists, barbers, and makeup artists do visual-based work, and tend to promote it on social channels. This meant Ideas Collide had lots of user content to potentially use. But it also required a uniform strategy for editing these images before reposting.

UGC images “are all kind of edited a little bit differently — some are better quality, some are worse,” explained Nicholas Winter, Ideas Collide’s senior art director.

“So there was a bit of exploration with figuring out how that would work, and finding a filter to use that could be adjusted depending on the quality of the image.”

The majority of this campaign, he estimated, is UGC, “and that’s a completely different strategy than we normally would use.”

Throw in the rotating monthly color palette, and we had our work cut out for us.

In a short time, “Bold & Beautiful” revitalized Paul Mitchell Schools’ social presence and breathed new life into their partnership with Ideas Collide. For us, it also exemplified our namesake — ideas colliding through collaboration, research, and hard work — proving the true value of informed content strategy, and showing what dynamic visuals can really accomplish when smart strategy guides them.

“I think it’s a true testament to our strengths and abilities at the agency,” Bjerk recalled, “and that a good strategy backed by real data and research always wins in the end.”