To target a niche audience with specific messaging, L’Oréal Paris worked with Google and their creative partner McCann to create a customized top-of-funnel branding creative.
First, briefly about L’Oréal. It’s a global brand in the beauty industry, with a portfolio of products sold in 130 countries across five continents. Their products cover the entire spectrum of beauty consumers’ requirements.
The exceptional heritage of the products of L’Oréal Paris makes the average age of its skincare customers in the Netherlands quite high – about 50.
Organizing the campaign, L’Oreal kept this in mind and developed Sugar Scrubs, a new line targeting younger audiences, who would grow up with the brand.
Understanding customer interests
To achieve this goal, L’Oréal used Google’s shared audience insights that allowed them to build a comprehensive view of potential customers. The insights revealed interests and affinities that L’Oréal had not considered before, such as TV shows, food, gaming, and film. This broadened the reach of the campaign. To use all the provided information, L’Oréal worked alongside Google ZOO, their media agency Zenith and their creative agency McCann.
Personalized creative part
Starting with a single video asset, the team generated 12 additional variations, using different texts and voices. The various messaging texts in each video were created to attract specific audience segments identified by Google’s insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1rKynqG5dk
The results
The campaign creative was run on YouTube targeting affinity segments, specific interest categories, and keywords.
“Advertising on YouTube enabled us to run precision marketing at scale, reaching the right audience with a message that was generated based on their interests,” tells Adeline Hoogveld. The rigorous approach paid off. Brand Lift studies showed a 144% rise in product interest, a 109% increase in brand interest, and a 30% increase in purchase intent. Finally, the campaign reached an audience of 1 million, the ads achieved an average view-through-rate of 44%, which compared favorably with the NL average of 25%.
Yeah! Marketers should “dare to trust data. You need to find your real audience and not just follow your assumptions. As we’ve shown, you don’t need an endless budget to make this work.” – concludes Thijs.
