Shaving Gel Skintimate Appeals to Girls With Virtual World, Video Contest

Women’s shaving gel brand Skintimate is targeting teen girls where they live online and hopes doing so will make lifelong customers out of them.

Its efforts to connect with young women include a partnership with a social gaming site, a presence within a related iPhone app, and Skintimate Studios, a contest that offers girls ages 13 to 18 the chance to make a 12-minute film in Hollywood next month.

As part of its new initiative, Skintimate has partnered with WeeWorld, a virtual world in which teens create avatars with personalized features, clothes, accessories and hobbies, as well as connect with friends. According to WeeWorld, there are 35 million registered avatars, called WeeMees.

WeeWorld users can sample different scents of Skintimate shaving gel with “auras” that represent various scents and are paired with personality traits such as fun, spirited, flirty, bold, daring and bright. There have been close to 150,000 downloads of auras on the site, creating about 35 million impressions, according to WeeWorld’s VP of national sales, Pauline Malcolm-John.

What’s more, WeeWorld has its Avatar Creator iPhone app that launched earlier this year and that now has about 500,000 users. Today, the Skintimate auras will go live on the app as well.

“We wanted to target new market entrants – teenagers – and build a loyal relationship for life,” said Jeffrey Wolf, senior brand manager at Skintimate.

Skintimate Studios

The contest portion of the campaign is open May 10 to June 15. Girls can enter by answering questions about why they want to participate and describing their strongest trait that would make them a valuable member of the team. Entries are accepted via video or essay on the Skintimate Studios Web site.

Skintimate will select 18 girls to fly to Hollywood in July for a seven-day film production. They will also have the chance to win a $500 scholarship and a handheld video camera.

The girls will be split into two teams of nine that will work with director Gail Mancuso, who has worked on Scrubs, 30 Rock, and Cougar Town. Both films will premiere in early August on the Skintimate Studios Web site as well as partner sites like Alloy, Facebook, Buzzmedia, myYearbook and Gorilla Nation. Consumers will vote for their favorite. The winning team will be flown to New York for a premiere party in September.

Skintimate is working with Dreaming Tree Films and digital agency Ryan iDirect on the campaign.

So far, Skintimate has 3,700 entries for the contest and it expects to have about 5000 by today, Wolf said.

The campaign has also helped build Skintimate’s presence on Facebook. According to Wolf, the brand had about 300 fans before the program launched, and now the Skintimate Studios fan page has nearly 11,000 fans.

Skintimate is manufactured by Energizer Personal Care.