We\u2019ve looked at how beauty firms have pursued digital transformation over the years<\/a>, and that was a theme picked up on at the recent Cannes Lions marketing jamboree in the South of France., where inevitably AI\u2019s current and future role came under the spotlight. When it comes to adopting new technology,\u00a0 Asmita Dube, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer for L’Or\u00e9al, said:<\/p>\nWe love to seize what is starting. We have a culture of innovation, and we absolutely love to see what is starting. How are we adopting AI? How are we adopting what is coming new that is there?<\/p>\n
She added:<\/p>\n
LLMs (Large Language Models) are becoming the new front door to beauty discovery, almost a billion people are on OpenAI ChatGPT today. So, as they are becoming that, the question becomes how do you [make sure you] come in the answer layer. How do you come in the answer layer is another content transformation. How do you come in the answer layer means content transformation in terms of authority building content? Do you have scientific journals? Do you have credible content? How do you make that and curate that? Second, the whole brand is building content, so is it transcripted? Do you have text on it, all the social media content, [some of] which was video?\u00a0 How will the machines read it? Is the product data, and the product content written down very well? Is it more descriptive? Does it have content? As these start getting better, then you start appearing in the answer layer in a credible way, which then means you can again click to buy or understand more, etc. etc. But it is always about the full funnel and the full journey. Just the way it happens keeps on evolving.<\/p>\n
Journeys<\/p>\n
The L\u2019Or\u00e9al transformative AI roadmap is built on three journeys: the consumers\u2019, the marketeers\u2019, and then that of the employees. Of the first of those, Dube explained:<\/p>\n
Around that consumer journey, beauty has always been a conversation. It is a conversation that is passed\u00a0 between generations, mother to daughter, shaped by experts. So, of course, when AI comes and that experience is moving to chat and a conversation, we want to re-define that dialog. So, once that strategy is clear, that we want to re-define that dialog, then we go on and do multi-functional activities between marketing, the brand head, and the 116 years of knowledge, which gets into a knowledge graph. It develops, transformation teams roll out, and the whole system works together, so that now you see something like Beauty Genius [AI recommendations assistant] is on the L’Or\u00e9al Paris USA website. We are rolling it out to WhatsApp. We are working with our partners. Then we bring other such products, and the knowledge graph keeps on evolving itself.<\/p>\n
A good example of AI\u2019s transformative impact can be found in L\u2019Or\u00e9al\u2019s famous \u2018Maybe it\u2019s Maybelline\u2019 jingle, she suggested:<\/p>\n
You take an old iconic jingle of a legacy brand, maybe it’s Maybelline, and then first you hand it over to Miley Cyrus, and she’s the creator at the top of the pyramid,\u00a0 she’s a brand ambassador, and you say, \u2018Why don’t you take this and do something with it?\u2019. So to start with, she starts to work on a new jingle [for] Maybe it’s Maybelline, and that jingle is like a work of art that she’s working on on her own. Then we open it to the macro and micro and nano creators, and we say, \u2018OK everybody, why don’t you share your version of the brand jingle?\u2019. Maybe it’s Maybelline goes viral, and from there on we got tens of millions of views on YouTube, and there’s an excitement around the topic, and the song, Maybe it’s Maybelline.<\/p>\n
Community\u00a0<\/p>\n
There’s a significant community aspect to all this:\u00a0<\/p>\n
You build the legacy on a big idea of the brand, but bringing along all the people, because it is moving from brand-say to people-say to creator-say. When you are talking to hundreds of thousands of creators for one campaign, and you want to bring them along, you need technology as a platform, but you also need communities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For example, our global creator club is called L’Or\u00e9al Star, and in L’Or\u00e9al Star, there are hundreds and thousands of creators who come in, and what we do with them is we give them a technology platform to be able to talk to us, where we create the occasion for one-to-one interaction of rewards of exclusive benefits on up-skilling on our brands, on making sure that they see what the brand stands for, what the product is about.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That is how they get to know more about the brand, and then they can create, and they have the freedom to create, but after understanding what the brand stands for. You have to be like super-careful, especially when you get to the nano level – how do you brief them in a way that’s informative but not controlling?<\/p>\n
As for marketing, Dube argues:<\/p>\n
I feel technology is coming to marketing and creativity like never before and I think that it is important for marketeers to absolutely embrace both the left brain and the right brain, the short term and the long term, the technology and the creativity, and use technology for what it is worth. It doesn’t mean you have to do gen AI content today – it will come anyway – but in the end-to-end marketing value chain, there is so much automation that will come, and the ways of working need to change, and I think we should be more demanding of AI. We should say, what can you do? What can AI do to make the consumer journey better? What can AI do to make the marketeer journey better? What can AI do in terms of making the marketing ecosystem of agencies and partners, which has all been fragmenting for the last decade. What can AI do to fix that? And in that sense, I would push all of us to demand more from AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maybe it’s Miley… In common with other retail areas, the beauty sector is finding that AI search is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12905],"tags":[13540,17201,31209,17199,1580],"class_list":["post-46605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-loreal","tag-agentic-ai","tag-crm-and-customer-experience","tag-digital-and-content-marketing","tag-generative-ai-and-llms","tag-loreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}