Good Conduct and Lumin Skincare Mansplain to Men in Brand’s First-Ever Ad Campaign

Advertising and content agency Good Conduct has created a national marketing campaign for Lumin Skincare, a premium skincare brand designed for men. 

'Skincare for men. Mansplained for men.' will break next month on TV, CTV, and in digital and social media. This is Lumin’s first brand-awareness advertising campaign, and Good Conduct is the company’s first B2C creative agency. The shop won the assignment after a credentials pitch last July and is handling brand strategy and production along with creative duties. Good Conduct created two 30-second, two 15-second, and one long-form web video, along with 15 social videos and 33 stills.

Modern men prioritise their mental and physical well-being but ignore one of their most prominent features—their face. They brush their teeth, eat healthy, meditate, and work out to look and feel better yet neglect to incorporate a skincare regimen into their routine. Or, if they do wash up, they figure a bar of soap will do just fine.

For way too long, skincare has been stigmatized as something “men don’t do,” said Kevin O’Connell, Lumin’s GM. “Many guys end up toughing out their skin issues because they feel uneasy about being perceived as a guy who uses skincare. Lumin wanted to develop a campaign that makes guys ask, ‘Wait, why don’t men use skincare? This is stupid.’ The goal of having guys ask this question is to help destigmatize and normalize skincare, because, well, they have faces, too, don’t they?” 

The central character in the spots is a humorous skincare guide who busts in on men in their homes to question their stubborn views and beliefs and suggests they try Lumin’s products. The campaign’s objective is to get men to try skincare with a brand designed specifically for them and drive people to purchase it at Target and Walmart, where they are launching in Q1 of this year.

“Most men know about skincare, whether from their significant other or just from common knowledge, but they still don’t maintain a routine—it’s just that they don’t think skincare is for men, don’t know what products to use, or don’t feel like they need it,” said Rob Lewis, co-founder and creative director of Good Conduct. “We’re explaining it to them in a way they can understand: simple products and easy-to-grasp routines, over-explained, simplified and explained again—mansplained.”

In fact, many of the spots use that term, which is normally reserved to identify behavior where men over-explain subjects to women in a patronizing fashion. Turning that idea on its head, the Lumin campaign is all about over-explaining a simple topic to men that most already know about—skincare—but just don’t practice. In other words, mansplaining. 

“We found that modern men (Millennials and Gen Zers) are willing to try something different than what they grew up watching their male role models do,” Lewis said. “We wanted to help provide that permission and ‘push’ to get them to think about their face differently.” 

In a recent Global Industry Analysts Inc. study, it was projected that the global men’s skincare products market will reach $16.3 billion by 2026. It was estimated at $12 billion in 2020.