The request was only five words long: “I want to go viral.” KVD Beauty had a new foundation, a recent rebrand, and the sort of problem that makes beauty marketers stare unhappily at a crowded feed. Full coverage is not a new promise. Saying it more loudly would not make it newer. So CMM, the New York communications agency, found a face on which the promise would become a plot.
The face belonged to Travis Barker, the Blink-182 drummer whose tattoos climb to his jaw. His daughter Alabama applied KVD's Good Apple foundation over them. The video began on her Instagram, moved through Barker's and KVD's accounts, then entered entertainment and beauty coverage. CMM reports more than 100 media hits and 666 million-plus reach in a week.
The useful idea is not “hire a famous drummer.” Fame helped, of course. The useful idea is simpler: make the product perform the headline. Before a viewer knew the shade name, the price, or the ingredients, the viewer understood what the foundation did. In an industry crowded with adjectives, CMM had made a verb.
The best CMM campaigns turn a product claim into a scene that can survive without the press release.The demonstration is the message
The agency behind the bathroom shelf
CMM is Creative Media Marketing, a privately held, woman- and minority-owned specialist founded by Stacey Miyamoto in Los Angeles and now headquartered on Broadway in SoHo. Its own site dates Miyamoto's founding of the agency to 2000. The firm works almost entirely in beauty and lifestyle, a category focus that makes its client list read like a well-stocked bathroom: La Roche-Posay, OPI, göt2b, Dial, OLEHENRIKSEN, LolaVie, Haus Labs, KISS, Wet Brush, and European Wax Center, among others.
Calling it a PR agency is correct but incomplete. CMM sells the connective tissue between brand strategy, press relationships, creators, celebrity talent, social content, live and virtual experiences, retail support, and reporting. A startup can use it to invent a voice. An established label can use it to introduce a franchise. A retailer can use it as an outside communications department. In 2025, Sally Beauty appointed CMM agency of record to help lead media relations, events, partnerships, and campaign planning around its strategic refresh.
The launch mechanism
This is the difference between a collection of vendors and an integrated agency. The photo, the interview, the influencer post, and the retail moment point at the same proposition. CMM's business model is ordinary in form - clients pay for communications work - but distinct in concentration. It keeps enough disciplines close together to choreograph the reveal.
A campout for nail polish
Consider OPI Nature Strong, a plant-based polish franchise launched when in-person events were still awkward. The assignment contained three problems: introduce a “natural” line in a category already crowded with such language, reach younger consumers than OPI usually did, and gather press and influencers without pretending the pandemic had ended.
CMM's answer was to make the word nature physical. Guests took a ferry to Governors Island, tested for COVID, checked into branded glamping tents, ate vegan food, made flower crowns, practiced yoga, received manicures, and sat down for an outdoor dinner and fireside talk. It was part press preview, part tiny branded country.
The reported results were 307 million-plus active-coverage impressions, more than 100 social posts, and $2.2 million in earned media value. Earned media value is an industry estimate rather than cash in a till, but the design logic is clear. Every detail gave a guest another object to photograph and another way to remember the line's positioning.
COVID broke the event. CMM kept the occasion.
The pandemic appears repeatedly in CMM's campaign archive, not as background but as a design constraint. For OLEHENRIKSEN's Lemonade Smoothing Scrub, a conventional global launch was impossible. CMM enlisted Beyoncé dance captain Ashley Everett, built a lemon-themed virtual platform, and ran three sessions to reach major Sephora markets from Australia to the United Kingdom. The presentation was prerecorded but delivered with live chat, a virtual photo booth, and trackable attendance. Within a month, the product was a top-ten global skincare bestseller at Sephora, according to the agency; within two weeks, US and Canadian coverage had passed 40 million impressions.
For göt2b, the answer was not to imitate a conference room online. CMM chose Twitch, secured DJ Pauly D, and produced a 40-minute Halloween dance party in ten days. It drew 107,033 unique viewers. Both projects preserved what a launch is meant to create: not information, but an occasion.
The numbers are not directly comparable. One is total impressions, one is reach, and one is unique event viewers. That is precisely why the graph is a picture of campaign scale, not a league table. CMM's job changes with the brief: cultural ubiquity for a celebrity haircare launch; rapid demonstration for foundation; a concentrated live audience for styling products.
Seven phone calls and a billion impressions
LolaVie presented a different trap. Jennifer Aniston was already one of the world's most recognizable hair references, which sounds like an advantage until one remembers how many celebrity brands arrive with little beyond recognition. CMM needed to establish authorship. Aniston had helped develop the products; the agency made that involvement the story.
First came a vague social teaser, which encouraged speculation without explaining the answer. Then seven editors received advance product and one-on-one phone interviews with Aniston. Their dedicated stories were coordinated for launch day, alongside a mailing to press and celebrity friends, followed by broader pitching. CMM reports 616 million-plus impressions from the tease alone, 57 million-plus from the exclusive interviews, and more than one billion overall across 100-plus placements.
Choose one believable product truth. Give it a visual form. Let a small group experience it before the public reveal. Then coordinate every channel around the same moment. Celebrity reach helps, but without access, proof, and timing, the method loses its engine.
That last caveat matters. A founder without genuine product involvement cannot borrow Aniston's interview strategy. A product that fails under demonstration should not borrow the Barker stunt. An immersive event with no connection to the formula becomes expensive scenery. CMM's method works when the spectacle compresses a truthful claim. When spectacle and substance separate, an audience can feel the seam.
The company after its founder
The most consequential CMM story was not a client campaign. Miyamoto died after building an agency known for unusually long relationships, including clients reported to have stayed as long as 18 years. The firm did not replace her with a single imitation. Longtime executives Corinne Pipitone, Carolanne Coviello, and Carolyn Marquez divided the work: creative vision and storytelling, client strategy and communications, and operations and team strength.
CMM has described the arrangement with refreshing plainness: they challenge one another, disagree, laugh, divide and conquer, and solve the hard things together. It is a leadership model that resembles the agency's campaigns. Different specialists hold different parts, but the outcome needs one voice. Five years into that chapter, the group became a 2026 BeautyMatter Awards finalist for Leadership Team of the Year. In 2023, the firm had already won BeautyMatter's award for Best Public Relations Agency.
The beauty market has no shortage of launch agencies, influencer brokers, event producers, social shops, or publicists. CMM sits at their intersection. Its moat is not a secret technology. It is accumulated category judgment: knowing which editor needs the science, which creator can carry the joke, which celebrity makes the demonstration credible, and which retail ambition the attention must eventually serve.
That is why its best work feels less like publicity than stage direction. The product enters. The lights come up. Someone does something memorable with it. And, if the machinery has been arranged correctly, the audience tells the next person what happened.