The TikTok Perfume Effect: What Moroccanoil's Measurement Gap Tells Every Senior Marketer

The most persuasive TikTok data point Moroccanoil collected in 2025 was not in any dashboard. Staff overheard it at a tennis tournament.

In February of last year, the brand launched its first-ever eau de parfum. Months later, it sponsored the Miami Open and set up a booth on site. A line formed down the block. Staff walked the queue and asked people what had brought them there. The answer was the same across the line: the perfume they had seen on TikTok.

Elizabeth Jordan (Sr. Manager of Performance Marketing, North America, Moroccanoil) oversees all performance marketing for Moroccanoil in North America. She recounted this at eTail Palm Springs 2026, alongside Hugo Hiley, Head of Sales at Fospha. “It was TikTok, TikTok, TikTok, TikTok,” she said. “While it’s difficult to measure that impact, we heard it anecdotally. And that made my life easier, because I’ve always known the impact that these things can have that aren’t so measurable. But then that flooded up to my upper management. They said, wow, we need to be doing more on TikTok.”

There is a lot packed into that story. A video ad drove enough product awareness to pull consumers from their seats at a major sporting event to a brand booth. No click captured any of that journey. The attribution system recorded nothing except whatever happened after someone eventually converted. The business case for the channel came not from a model but from frontline staff listening in an outdoor queue.

The gap between what you know and what you can prove

Elizabeth’s definition of upper-funnel advertising is worth holding onto. It is any emotional storytelling element of the brand, through video, where a consumer can connect with what the brand represents without any push to buy. The viewer is not looking for a conditioner that week. The brand is simply present. When she eventually is looking, Moroccanoil has a better chance of being what she reaches for.

Moroccanoil made 2025 its biggest year of upper-funnel investment on this logic. The challenge is that the logic, however sound, resists formal measurement.

“There’s not really a way to measure emotional KPIs,” Elizabeth said. “Human reaction to things is very nuanced. You might feel something when you see a video that you don’t vocalize, but you internalize.” Reach and impression metrics tell you how many people saw something. They do not tell you how many will later choose Moroccanoil over whoever else is on the shelf. No tracking improvement closes that gap. It sits between where brand value gets created and where performance marketing knows how to look.

Last-click measurement handles this by ignoring it. It does not struggle to value upper-funnel investment. It simply cannot see it. So brands underfund the channels where memory gets built and overspend where attribution runs clean, even when the former drives a significant share of actual demand.

Getting off last click is a people problem, not a tech problem

Hugo framed the transition to full-funnel measurement in terms most measurement vendors prefer to avoid. The technical integration has become straightforward. Modern MMM tools connect to platform data through APIs without a long implementation. The software is not the obstacle. “Once you do transition, getting people to action that data is usually only done through transparency,” he said. “Why does your data say this? Why is it different to what the platform says? Navigating someone through that is a process. You need to win people internally, which is not something you can do overnight.”

In most organizations, the practical obstacle is a CEO or CFO who has governed by last-click long enough to treat it as objective truth. Changing that requires a sustained conversation, not a better chart. Hugo puts the timeline at months in most cases.

Elizabeth largely sidesteps the data argument. She asks leadership to think like a consumer instead. “Step out of the box you’ve created for yourself and remember that you are also a consumer. What are your touch points that will get you to discover a brand, consider a brand, then actually purchase from a brand? It’s a fairly long process, and it’s more than just one touch point.” Leadership, she has found, responds better to this framing than to measurement comparisons. Everyone in the room has bought something online. Everyone knows their own path to purchase involved more than a single ad.

The measurement infrastructure to formalize this picture now exists. Fospha’s always-on MMM updates daily at the ad level and gives fair credit to impression-led channels like TikTok and CTV, including halo effects on DTC and marketplace revenue that click-based tools cannot reach. Moroccanoil is currently onboarding to Fospha. Hugo cited the pattern directly from Fospha’s client base: across brands managing roughly $4 billion in aggregate annual spend, those putting more than 10% of budget into brand awareness activity outperform consistently. “The halo effect is real,” Hugo said. “We’re seeing the halo effect across Google Max, onto marketplaces. If you’re able to tie that, you can create a different narrative for your CFO to spend more, scale more.

Seventeen channels, built one at a time

When Elizabeth joined Moroccanoil six years ago, the brand ran paid social, paid search, and affiliate. Today she oversees 17 revenue-driving channels, with Reddit launching next. That expansion happened one channel at a time, not all at once.

Her standing advice to the brand’s international teams is to hold off on new channels until the foundational ones have real depth.

“Affiliate isn’t going to do much if you don’t have that brand awareness already. It’s so lower funnel that you do need some saturation in some of the other channels before you can fly that plane.”

Lower-funnel channels depend on the awareness that upper and mid-funnel channels create. Launch affiliate into a market where the brand is barely known and you are paying commissions for sales you would have captured anyway.

Fospha’s data supports this. Brands spending across more than 11 channels outperform those with narrower mixes, but reaching that breadth is a maturity outcome. The performance curve climbs from zero to six channels, then to ten, then to eleven-plus. The right move is to climb it deliberately. People are everywhere now, Hugo noted, including in LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. The job is to find them wherever they are. But that is a long-range orientation, not a directive to expand into everything this quarter.

AI handles the work nobody wanted

The final question at eTail asked what AI should own versus what should stay human.

Elizabeth’s list of what she would hand to AI is operational. Creative design that currently takes four weeks could take an hour. Copywriting iteration that burns time could shrink dramatically. What she does not want to lose is the human direction that makes AI output usable: knowing what you want the brand to say, how you want it to sound, and why those things matter. “You still need the human element behind the AI as a marketer,” she said, “to direct it and dictate what you want it to do and how you want it to talk to people.”

Hugo pushed back on the anxiety around AI and headcount. The brands using AI effectively at eTail are not running leaner. They are hiring more, because efficiency gains free up budget for people doing strategic work rather than production work.

On Fospha’s side, recent product work focuses on collapsing the distance between measurement and action. The ROAS agent, which Fospha launched the week of eTail Palm Springs, answers the CFO question in real time: why is ROAS up, why is it down, what should happen next. “Elizabeth can go to her boss and just say, this is exactly why ROAS is down, this is what we should do next,” Hugo said. “Making that really easy for marketers who use Fospha is so important.”

What this means for senior marketers

The Miami Open story follows a pattern common to most brands running significant upper-funnel investment. Something works. You can feel it working. The formal measurement does not confirm it. You make the case with whatever evidence you have, including things your booth staff overheard in a queue.

The tools to close that gap now exist. Brands can tie upper-funnel spend to downstream revenue and show CFOs numbers rather than narratives. But in the gap between where measurement infrastructure sits today and where it needs to be, the marketers gaining ground are the ones willing to act on what they know before they can prove it.

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EVENT COVERAGE SPONSORED BY FOSPHA