Diego dalla Palma

The objective

Continuing TikTok success with an Italian Avant-Garde beauty icon

Diego dalla Palma is an iconic Italian beauty brand born from the vision of Diego dalla Palma, one of Italy’s most influential and unconventional makeup artists, costumers and scenographers. Emerging in the late 1970s, the brand quickly distinguished itself through a bold, theatrical approach to beauty, combining influences from cinema, fashion, and artistic expression in a way that challenged the conventions of the beauty industry at the time.

Today, the brand is operated by Cosmetica HUB SPA, a company focused on beauty, research, and innovation, continuing Diego dalla Palma’s legacy through makeup, skincare, and haircare collections that combine creativity with performance.

On TikTok, @diegodallapalma has developed an organic presence of over 25K followers, sharing bold, playful, and trend-led beauty content. The brand’s content focuses on artistic makeup looks, product showcases, skincare and haircare routines, alongside creative campaigns such as the TOY collection, helping connect the brand with Gen Z and younger Millennial audiences while reflecting its theatrical and irreverent identity.

While the brand has consistently invested in TikTok media campaigns over recent years with a primary focus on video views, Diego dalla Palma worked alongside Digital Dust Agency to create a new strategy focused on Reach & Frequency.

The solution

Playful storytelling designed to maximise reach and brand recall

Running across Italy, the campaign leveraged Spark Ads to maximise reach and brand recall across the TOY product range. Spark Ads are TikTok’s native advertising format, allowing brands to amplify organic and creator content directly within users’ feeds whilst maintaining the authentic look and feel of standard TikTok posts. This approach helped Diego dalla Palma deliver product-focused creative in a way that felt natural to the platform and highly engaging for different audience segments.

The content approach combined fun and informative storytelling designed to make the products both memorable and relatable. Central to the campaign was the playful “Toys before Boys” concept, which framed product benefits through entertaining, easy-to-understand content. Multiple creative formats were used to showcase different products across the range, highlighting versatility, functionality, and visual impact whilst maintaining a strong, recognisable campaign identity.

Alongside branded content, influencers were given flexibility to adapt creative to their own tone of voice and style, helping the campaign feel authentic, trend-aware, and native to TikTok culture. This balance between structured campaign messaging and creator freedom allowed the content to resonate naturally across different age groups whilst reinforcing the playful and theatrical identity already associated with the brand.

While no split tests or dedicated test-and-learn structures were used within this specific initiative, the campaign benefited from the brand’s ongoing investment in TikTok video view campaigns, allowing previous platform learnings and audience understanding to inform campaign delivery and creative direction.

The results

+140% video view rate, achieved by amplifying authentic content through Spark Ads

The campaign delivered strong awareness for Diego dalla Palma, successfully increasing reach and brand recall across the TOY product range. Achieving a total reach of 5.7M users alongside a CPM of just €1.03, performing 31% more efficiently than the average Reach & Frequency campaign benchmark. In parallel, the campaign delivered a 6-second VTR of 3.73%, outperforming the average for reach campaigns by +140%, demonstrating strong creative engagement and memorability across both target audience groups.

A key factor behind performance was the decision to structure the activity into two separate campaigns targeting different age groups. This allowed the brand to tailor creative selection more precisely, ensuring that each audience segment received the assets most likely to resonate with their interests, behaviours, and content preferences.

Building on the playful “Toys before Boys” creative concept, the campaign combined multiple voices, formats, and product showcases to make the TOY range feel memorable, entertaining, and easy to understand. Allowing influencers flexibility within the campaign structure also helped content feel more authentic and native to TikTok, strengthening engagement and overall brand recall.

Beyond the core metrics, the campaign reinforced Diego dalla Palma’s positioning amongst younger audiences by translating the brand’s theatrical and unconventional identity into a TikTok-native format. By showcasing products through varied creative approaches and relatable storytelling, the campaign exceeded the brands goals for increasing reach and awareness. 

This is a TikTok case study and is solely for informational purposes. Past performance does not guarantee or predict future performance.