Dear all,
The year is more than half way through and the least one could say is that 2026 has been a heck of a creative moment so far.
In a world where AI is more present each day, luxury brands keep surprising the public with a single goal in mind : capturing a unique space in the hearts and minds of their audiences.
A few examples:
- Audemars Piguet, a house that sells six-figure watches, collaborated with Swatch. The mutant child born of this union is a playful collab that gained iconic status almost immediately.
- Two hypercar makers' most viewed videos of the semester are about LEGOs. Koenigsegg built a life-sized LEGO Technic car (11.3M views) while Bugatti showed "When you order a LEGO Technic Bugatti Chiron and the CEO of Bugatti shows up" in a 4.6M-view video.
The two least accessible car brands on earth, and plastic bricks outperformed everything else they made.
- Beauty retailer Sephora joked about how consumers try to use as little of their high-priced beauty products as possible (but not when it's someone else's products). Called "me using my expensive products", the humorous campaign generated 25M+ views.
- And last, Luxury brands went from one extreme to the other in terms of video duration. Rolex's biggest video of the half is a 23-minute film that generated almost 50M views while Pomellato's best campaign of H1 2026 (with 5.9M views) is a four-second TikTok.
These are only a handful of examples out of the 150 campaigns put together in this special report. It's a crucial recap of the top luxury & beauty videos of H1 2026.
I hope you'll enjoy this week's edition and that it will make you think ...
What The Luxe?!
Cheers,
PS: feel free to hit reply to leave a comment, I read and answer every message
Data provided by Submarine.ai the Frontier Insights Lab that boost your business and make your content irresistible.
A Submarine special report, free this week
We ranked every luxury and beauty brand's most-watched video of the first half of 2026. That's 150 videos, 1.9B views between them, split into eight categories.
Check the report here:
Free, and no sign-up. Opens straight in Google Slides.
It is full of insights, here's a teaser of what you'll find in this special report:
H1 2026 in four numbers
| 150 videos ranked by views |
| 1.9B views across the 150, nine percent of everything luxury and beauty published |
| 202,765 videos analyzed to find them, January to June 2026 |
A look inside
Every headline number for the half, and one of the 150 playing.
All 202,765 luxury and beauty videos of the half, by category.
The 150 measured against the whole market: reach, engagement and length.
The ranking itself, twenty brands to a page, every video one click away.
What you will learn
- Which brand owns the most-watched video of the semester, and by how far.
- The top 20 in Fashion, Beauty, Watches & Jewelry, Retail, Automotive, Hotels & Travel, Wines & Spirits and Home & Interiors.
- What the biggest campaigns do differently: reach, engagement and length, measured against the whole market rather than against each other.
- Which platform carries the posts and which one carries the views. They are not the same platform.
- Why February took is a special moment for luxury brands.
- Which categories gained ground on luxury's attention and which lost it.
Free, and no sign-up. Opens straight in Google Slides.
This one is on us. The rest are for members.
Special reports are how we go deep on one question at a time, with the data behind it. This edition is free to everyone. The full library, every past report and every one we publish from here, comes with What The Luxe Premium.
See what Premium includesOr browse the report archive first.
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Data provided by Submarine.ai. The ranking covers January 1 to June 30, 2026: 202,765 public videos from Luxury & Beauty brand accounts on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, images and media titles excluded. One video per brand, its most-watched of the half. Videos below 100,000 views are excluded and each category shows its top 20. Engagement rate is likes plus comments over views. View counts are as scraped, so the newest posts are still climbing.
