Ouai's Slasher Comedy Signals a Beauty Industry Bet on Long-Form Video

Ouai released a three part slasher comedy called Chopped this week, starring Victoria Pedretti of Netflix's "You" and "The Haunting of Hill House." The P&G owned hair care brand shot the series in its Los Angeles offices with director Fidel Ruiz-Healy, and the production ran nearly a year from pitch to premiere. The result looks like a movie trailer, with a score, a cast and an edit built for someone to finish the whole thing, not scroll past it.

That runtime is the point. Amanda Martinez, vp of brand marketing at Ouai, told Glossy that short clips optimized for a two second scroll no longer carry the same weight with audiences flooded by AI generated video. "With the rise of AI, people are craving really creative, really authentic content, and they're willing to engage, whether that's with lo-fi or hi-fi content, but they just don't want things they can't trust," Martinez said.

Ouai is not testing this alone. On Monday, Meta opened a beta program letting select creators post Reels up to 90 minutes long, a shift for a feed format built around videos measured in seconds. The two moves land in the same week and point at the same bet: platforms and brands are both deciding that length signals effort, and effort signals a human made it.

For a beauty category built on fast, cheap content, that is a real repositioning. Haircare brands have spent years competing on fifteen second tutorials and influencer unboxings, formats any studio can now generate with a prompt. A three part scripted series with a recognizable lead actress costs more to produce and takes longer to land, which raises the entry price for competitors trying to copy it fast.

P&G has run this kind of long bet before. Its Old Spice campaigns turned ad creative into a standalone media property, and Ouai, which P&G acquired in 2023, now gets a similar playbook applied to a hair care line instead of a legacy grooming brand. Chopped functions less as a seasonal Halloween tie in and more as a test of whether a beauty brand can own a release calendar the way a studio does.

The format also changes how the content gets measured. A listicle of product tips lives or dies on click through rate within a day. A slasher comedy with a known actress invites completion rate, watch time and press coverage, the kind of signals that build a brand as media property rather than a single campaign spike. Glossy's own coverage of the launch, paired with trade attention from outlets tracking the format shift, is itself part of that measurement.

Whether Chopped moves product is a separate question from whether it moves attention, and Ouai has not published sales or view data tied to the series. What the brand has done is commit a year of production budget to a bet that scripted, feature adjacent content converts better than another round of short clips, at a moment when Meta is widening the pipe for exactly that kind of video to travel.