During a fireside chat at The Drum Live, L’Oréal’s chief digital and marketing officer for the UK & Ireland lifts the lid on how the beauty conglomerate is adapting to industry shifts and seizing new opportunities.
Hannah Bowler and Laetitia Raoust on stage at The Drum Live
When Laetitia Raoust, global marketing leader at L’Oréal, speaks about the future of brand building, it is clear the industry is in a state of major transformation. Once reliant on glossy campaigns, rigid brand control and traditional media buying, the beauty giant is now embracing agility and experimentation.
At the heart of this change is an openness to new platforms, new creators and new technologies, as well as a willingness to cede some control.
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Influencer marketing isn’t new for L’Oréal, but the pace and philosophy behind it are evolving rapidly.
“Now, we’re able to have 1,000 influencers posting about this trend with our products within five days,” says Raoust. “Before, you would have a campaign that would take about a month. Now we’re talking days. This level of agility requires a reshuffling in this new ecosystem.”
That shift, she admits, is as much cultural as operational. It’s a big change for a brand long used to tightly managing every message. “Now, we have to commit to a relationship with creators, trust the relationship and embrace what they’re creating, because, at the end of the day, we want this to be as genuine as possible – they have their tone of voice, they have their stories to tell.”
To allow for that relinquishing of control, L’Oréal has created brand frameworks and guidelines. “If anything, influencer marketing forces us to know our brands better,” Raoust says.
L’Oréal is also pivoting with the wider market from working with purely top-tier influencers to embracing micro and nano creators. The content they generate now isn’t confined to social feeds. Increasingly, it’s being repurposed across its TV and print ads and across its entire media mix.
The other major shift has been in retail media – a channel that has become “a big portion” of L’Oréal’s investment mix.
Previously, the company was, in Raoust’s words, “awareness- and reach-obsessed.” Now, with retail media, the focus has broadened to include acquisition and conversion. “By its nature, it’s quite transactional,” she explains. “It brings us a more full-funnel approach.”
Yet, for all its promise, retail media brings headaches too. “The downside is that it’s super fragmented. Sometimes it can be difficult for us to measure. It’s not necessarily harmonized between platforms. So, for us, it’s still a challenge to have a real point of view on what it’s bringing to us and how good is good.”
Measurement, Raoust insists, must be broader than a single metric. “ROI is an easy and good indicator and it’s not going to go anywhere,” she says. But the idea is more to make sure that they combine ROI with other KPIs, some of them being more qualitative, some of them being more focused on recruitment, acquisition, etc. It’s just not being only focused on ROI for sure.”
That balanced view allows for reinvestment in experimentation. “When you improve your ROI, you spend less money for the same result. The money you haven’t spent there, you can then invest in other platforms, new products, new launches. If we optimize something, we’ll invest what’s saved into testing new things.”
That’s how L’Oréal was able to move quickly on TikTok Shop. “We started before we could really prove any ROI,” Raoust admits. “It’s been a big philosophy in the past years – to try new things, even if we don’t have the ROI yet.”
No conversation about marketing today is complete without AI and, for L’Oréal, the technology is already deeply embedded.
“L'Oréal really has this mentality of when we sees what’s starting, we get fomo if we’re not here. So, of course, AI for us is important because we don’t necessarily know exactly everything that we’re going to be able to do with it, but we want to make sure we see that we are there to seize the opportunity.”
Internally, the company has rolled out its own ChatGPT-style platform, already used for tasks like translation, ideation and summarization. Across media buying, AI-driven algorithms are helping target audiences more effectively. In insights and testing, AI accelerates experimentation, creating more scenarios and faster validation.
The mindset, Raoust suggests, is what matters most. “It takes curiosity and the will to try new things, but also agility. I’m super happy when someone in the team comes and says, ‘I’ve met these guys, they do this, can we try it?’ I’m happy that, as a big company, we can still try. We’re still allowed to put a pilot in place and then scale it.”
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Asked what it takes to be a marketing leader today, Raoust doesn’t hesitate. “You need AI literacy, you need to be very comfortable with data, but I think you need to be really good at storytelling. We’re in a world where we’re telling stories all the time and all these tools are here and they’re only good if you’re able to tell your story in a different way that will stick in people’s minds.”
She is constantly reminding her marketers that they need to be good storytellers. “That’s a huge skill needed forever.”
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