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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

RealBeauty Celeb Makeover Comes to iPhone
Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The recently launched beauty and fashion brand from Hearst, RealBeauty.com, has been extended onto the iPhone and iPod Touch today with The Instant Celebrity Makeover app. The free, sponsored app uses the Modiface technology to upload a user’s phone camera image to the service and superimpose it on the face and body of a fashionable, leggy celebrity. The user can save or share the result via email or Facebook.

The iPhone app is really more of a showpiece for sponsor Venus Embrace razors than it is a mobile iteration of the RealBeauty brand. The Procter & Gamble product is present throughout an experience that emphasizes at every turn silky smooth legs and the brand logo. At load, the user is invited to run a pre-roll video of the razor ad or just to pop into the makeover tool. You can make quick work of positioning and resizing your own photo so it fits a target zone and superimposes pretty well on a celeb you choose form a red carpet gallery. The resulting image comes on screen with a large column of promotional copy for the razor as well.

Instant Celebrity Makeover actually seems more like a custom publishing project than even a sponsored app. Its main purpose is to get the Venus Embrace message across and there is little RealBeauty content involved. Yet, it exemplifies what publishers now can do on behalf of sponsors. Hearst tells us that the app will be part of a larger cross-platform ad arrangement with P&G, and Web site and newsletter assets will be used to help promote it.

One of the problems that brands like P&G have had in developing stand-alone “branded apps” like this is the cost of distribution. Getting noticed in the cluttered Apple app store usually requires mobile ad buys that help push existing iPhone app customers to the new offering. By attaching itself to an editorial brand with a built-in, well-targeted audience and promotional network, P&G is able to reach its audience more efficiently than it could on its own. Even in an age when digital platforms give advertisers more direct access to their customers, media still matters.


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