Social Rocket
Urban Decay has racked up 3,8 million video views in five days with a Halloween series on ReelShort. Behind “Ghost Hunter Hotline” is a change of direction in L’Oréal’s beauty marketing: instead of sending a short ad into the feed, the brand has its products become part of an ongoing story.
The short series, published on 24 October 2026, follows Zoe and her friends, who push back against men who ghosted them while dating. Urban Decay’s “Ghosting Spray” becomes a narrative prop. L’Oréal put the views in the first five days at 3,8 million when speaking to Marketing Dive; at times the title reached second place among the most-watched short series on ReelShort.
The product gets a role instead of an ad break
The trick lies in the story: ghosting is a term from dating culture, a fitting product name and the basis for the Halloween plot. The spray does not appear as a promo caption added afterwards; it takes part in the action directly. An old flame reappears, the friends run into new conflicts, and viewers have a reason to stick around until the next episode.
ReelShort lists the series in its catalogue. The collaboration was already teased on 20 October via the social channels of ReelShort and Urban Decay. The platform is therefore not merely providing distribution space, but also the format and its audience.
L’Oréal moves production onto the platform
2025 L’Oréal had already used a five-part Christmas romance for Maybelline: “Maybe This Christmas” was made with the agency Maximum Effort and ran across several social channels as well as ReelShort. The focus was the Instant Eraser concealer.
With the new Urban Decay project, the US team went a step further. L’Oréal developed and produced the series directly with ReelShort, instead of only running a finished video on one more platform. For brands, that is an interesting difference: storyline, episode rhythm and tone are developed together with a provider whose users specifically seek out such stories.
The move fits the shift toward video series rather than isolated single clips. It also shows a different model from 7-Eleven’s K-drama for TikTok and Instagram, where each episode is directly linked to a product offer.
Microdramas compete for real screen time
The format is by now far bigger than a Halloween experiment. Market researcher Omdia forecasts 14 billion US dollars in global microdrama revenue for 2026. In the US mobile data examined for the fourth quarter 2025, ReelShort users spent an average of 35,7 minutes a day in the app, and Netflix users on smartphones 24,8 minutes.
For beauty brands, what matters is less the overall size than the attention of an audience that deliberately watches episodic stories. On classic social platforms, by contrast, a brand clip immediately competes with every other piece of content in the feed.
YouTube is also trying to turn this viewing behaviour into a business model: microdramas and channel memberships are increasingly being linked there.
What social teams can take from this
A microdrama campaign first needs a conflict and a character that viewers want to see again. A product can then be worked into the story in a meaningful way. For evaluation, besides video views, the most interesting metrics are episode completions, viewers who move on to the next episode, brand searches and visits to the shop.
The Urban Decay series shows what is possible with platform-native collaboration: the story draws the audience in, and the brand becomes part of the experience. For brands that want to reach younger audiences through mobile video, this is an appealing alternative to the next classic product spot.
Sources: Marketing Dive, 05.11.2026; ReelShort, “Ghost Hunter Hotline”; Omdia, microdrama market and usage, 23.02.2026; Marketing Dive, Maybelline series 2025.
Illustrative image: Christian Agbede / Unsplash.