Garnier Enlists Love Island’s TJ Palma for Viral 'Moose' Campaign

Garnier spent the week convincing people that a moose was loose in New York City.

The L’Oréal-owned haircare brand has launched a campaign starring "Love Island" personality TJ Palma to promote its Fructis Curl Construct Creation Mousse.

Here, they intentionally confuse consumers into thinking the company was marketing a moose instead of hair mousse.

At the center of the campaign is Palma, whose curly hair content helped make him a natural fit for the product push.

Garnier casts him as the company’s newly hired consultant, only for him to completely misunderstand the assignment and build an entire "moose campaign" around the animal.

The haircare brand stretched this pun-infused joke across Instagram, street activations, and creator content to get people talking before revealing the product connection.

The campaign arrives as more beauty brands chase younger consumers through social media marketing that feels closer to internet entertainment.

It also reveals how brands increasingly use fake mistakes and staged confusion to spark conversation online.

Companies like CeraVe and even Wendy's have used similar tactics to blur the line between entertainment and advertising, with the latter briefly changing its brand name to "Tendy's." 

For CeraVe, it partnered with NBA star Kevin Durant as its new "face of legs," leveraging an internet meme to drive a point home about moisturizing. 

Hunting for the 'Moose'

A hero video styled like "The Office" follows Palma awkwardly pitching his moose idea inside Garnier headquarters.

The mockumentary-style setup eventually leads to a get-ready-with-me segment where the influencer demonstrates how he actually uses the Fructis mousse product in his curl routine.

Before officially revealing the campaign, Garnier posted unexplained moose-themed images online and scattered missing-moose flyers across New York City.

The brand then escalated the stunt with paparazzi-style sightings of Palma wearing a moose costume around Manhattan to make the campaign a real-world scavenger hunt.

Additional activations included guerrilla-style product sampling in downtown Manhattan, where Garnier distributed full-sized mousse products directly to consumers.

Lastly, creator partnerships move the campaign online through influencers, including Mia Calabrese and content creator Just Jazzy.

Overall, it's a signal of Garnier’s attempt to promote mousse, a product category that can sometimes feel dated, to younger shoppers discovering curl-care products. 

Garnier’s Fake 'Moose' Strategy

To reconnect older product categories with younger audiences, understanding their humor is a must.

Garnier is showing how to create buzz toward a product without having to have massive production budgets:

• Curiosity over clarity. Letting the joke unfold slowly gives audiences a reason to keep watching, reposting, and speculating instead of immediately scrolling past.
• Real-world stunts travel further online.87% of consumers remember brand experiences over ads, so designing moments like street sightings or interactive displays can effectively stick in memory.
• Old products can feel new again. Pairing familiar categories with internet personalities helps brands reintroduce everyday products through people audiences already follow and trust daily.

Based on L’Oréal Group’s 2024 annual report, the beauty giant generated €43.48 billion (about $50 billion) in sales, highlighting the scale of its global beauty portfolio, which includes Garnier. 

Our Take: Does the Internet Reward Confusion More Than Clarity?

Garnier understands how people actually behave online now.

And rule #1 of humor marketing is to never rush to explain the joke.

Brands throw something weird into the feed and let people argue about it for two days first, because that uncertainty becomes part of the entertainment and drives engagement. 

But for us, the smartest thing Garnier did was choosing someone like Palma, whose existing curl-care audience already made the campaign believable enough to work.

There’s also something refreshing about seeing a haircare brand embrace absurdity this openly.

Beauty marketing usually fixates on glitz and glamour, or treats products like scientific breakthroughs.

Garnier treated mousse like a lighthearted punchline instead, and that probably gives the product more memorability than another glossy salon commercial would have.

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