How a Beauty Company Doubled Their Revenue With Programmatic Advertising

by Nikhil Sharma January 22, 2016
January 22, 2016

loreal b2c nikhil sharma programmatic advertising


The beauty industry is one of the most competitive industries out there. Companies are constantly striving to capture the attention of consumers. If not, their competition could easily steal away their temperate customers on the next trip to the mall or drugstore while walking down the aisles looking at shelf-space.


New colors, formulas and promises are being made every day about how a product will help a woman look and feel more attractive or confident. For one brand of makeup, this competition became too difficult to sustain: L’Oreal.


L’Oreal’s Challenges


This was the challenge for L’Oreal Luxe make up in North America. In 1983, the brand was started by Shu Uemura, a Japanese makeup artist. In 2004, L’Oreal bought the brand, gaining significant sales on a global scale. The only market that was slow to adopt the new product was North America.


In 2010, the brand was forced to pull products from American stores. This led to a unique challenge. How could they continue to sell products in such a competitive market without a physical location to buy the makeup? A Google case study showed that the answer came from programmatic advertising.


Why Programmatic Advertising?


The first step toward exploring new marketing tactics to drive sales in North America was to outline their goals. L’Oreal decided they wanted to:



  1. Re-introduce the person who made L’Oreal well-known in the last part of the 20th century, Shu Uemura.
  2. Build sales of the special “Shu Uemura Collection” by Karl Lagerfeld.
  3. Nurture new leads by growing the Shu Uemura email list.

To do this, they’d enter phase one of their marketing strategy. It started with prospecting by enticing customers with a new product. Then, once interest grew, they’d acquire email addresses and retarget potential customers targeting them with products they’d show some purchase intent in.


What They Did Right


With a plan in place, they set the ball in motion, and L’Oreal started using programmatic ads to inch prospects from one stage to the next.


To do this, they knew they needed to hyper target their message. They created unique audiences within their DMP (Data Management Platform) to get a better understanding of what each demographic was doing and wanted to purchase. With this, they could refine their messaging and capture more interest, and funnel more consumers into their sales funnel – whether they could calculate it or not.


With the audience information in hand, they started buying paid media in Google display and social channels.


The Outcome


With the various audiences, L’Oreal was able to target messages to the right audience at the right time and at the right place on a user’s web experience. This meant more engagement from consumers, which ultimately led to higher sales.


Their targeted campaign almost doubled their projected revenue. By remarketing their messaging, they were able to exceed their CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition) goals by 73% in the United States. This was compared to only 13% higher CPA for paid search ads (When was the last time you clicked on a paid-search ad?).


Could Programmatic Work for Your Business?


No matter which industry you’re in, if you have competition, programmatic advertising can create new selling opportunities for you. There is so much information on your as a web-user, we could literally create a campaign to target people who are flying into LAX airport within the next X days, or even people who read a certain article on a publisher site, like Vogue or Elite Daily. By tying audience data in with your media buying, you’re able to make updates in real-time. You can instantly see what’s working and what isn’t. The faster you calibrate your ads to higher converting messages, the better your brand will do. Programmatic makes this easy and effective.

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