The most successful brand partnerships aren’t just about who the brand partners with – they’re about knowing when and how to enter the cultural conversation.

For TRESemmé’s Bouncy Curls campaign, that meant looking beyond traditional beauty talent and tapping into a strong cultural insight: heartthrob marketing.This is an approach that utilizes male talent to capture the attention of female audiences. Backed by data and growing social conversation, heartthrob marketing is rapidly trending in beauty because a male “internet crush” has an instant scroll stopper ability that not only drives attention but conversation. We’ve seen it with Rob Rausch appearing in campaigns for MAC and Kosas and Harris Dickinson appearing for Rhode. Alongside this cultural insight, UEG was tasked with identifying a strong talent partner for TRESemmé’s redefined Bouncy Curls Line.

With this, UEG identified Belmont Cameli as the perfect fit. As his cultural momentum accelerated, so was the online conversation around him. The young Hollywood actor stepped into the spotlight as “Garrett Graham” in Prime Video’s Off Campus, the adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s popular romance series, and Belmont was quickly becoming one of the newest faces of the book-to-screen phenomenon. We’d seen a similar playbook unfold with Heated Rivalry: a passionate book fandom meets a buzzy screen adaptation, and suddenly its leading men are everywhere. Off Campus had many of the same components, but importantly, it was still on the way up. 

Still a rising actor (IG following less than 2M at the time) and not yet a household name, there was a unique gateway to create a timely campaign as Belmont was starting to become the “internet’s boyfriend.” TRESemmé had the opportunity to tap into fandom as it was building, rather than chase the moment after it had peaked. Further, the brand was able to borrow his fandom and not solely his reach. The result was a partnership that felt connected to something audiences were already talking about, rather than a traditional celebrity endorsement placed alongside it.

But timing alone wasn’t enough. What made the partnership especially powerful was the clear connection between talent, cultural conversation and product truth: Belmont’s signature curls were already part of what fans noticed and talked about online. TRESemmé didn’t have to manufacture a reason to be part of the conversation, it had an authentic one.

With any successful partnership, the ultimate goal is to convert celebrity equity into product credibility. TRESemmé did exactly that, turning what fans already loved about Belmont into a reason to believe in Bouncy Curls, and proving that the most powerful partnerships don’t just capture cultural attention – they give the brand a credible way to own a piece of it. 

As a result, the organic launch video exceeded benchmarks on both Instagram and TikTok platforms – in just one week, the launch collab video surpassed 11 million views and generated nearly 3 years of watch time, turning “Hot Curl Summer” from a campaign into a genuine cultural moment.