L’Oreal’s USA CMO: Digital is at the Center of Everything in Marketing
The policy of cosmetics giant L’Oreal has been to continue to invest in digital marketing. Not a bold move, it is to be expected, and now it seems the company’s representatives are happy with the results, sales were up, and now they can increase the digital spend and the overall marketing budget at the same time.
“The one thing that’s interesting is that we are, in partnership with our TV and print partners, starting to understand the digital linkage, or how digital is starting to impact [the effectiveness of] traditional TV and print”, said in an interview for AdAge Marc Speichert, CMO L’Oreal USA.
He emphasized the importance of digital marketing and explained how it changed products and business models, and also the way company marketers thought about being creative.
“We had a get-together recently, and the whole theme was “marketing reinvented.” The reason is because we felt digital is at the center of everything the marketer is touching,” Speichert added. “Everyone is recognizing digital is impacting media, the whole path to purchase and how digital is changing that dynamic.”
Another important conclusion emerging from the L’Oreal digital experiment was that they didn’t just say they were pleased with the results from the online campaigns, they were making an assessment based on measured ROI.
As Speichert clearly pointed out, “So we did some ROI calculations on people exposed to the channel vs. those not exposed and then measured it back to point-of-sale data, and we were quite pleased with the numbers. That’s why we’re continuing to believe in those channels and think about what new channel opportunities exist.”
L’Oreal created Next Fund, a corporate budget dedicated to innovation, dedicated not only to what was proven to be successful, but also for new attempts, even if some of those had failed, so that they would encourage employees to share interesting things and ideas. After a thorough analysis, some of the ideas became reality, going from pilot projects to countrywide marketing campaigns.
At a time where studies and market research show the growing importance and budgets for digital marketing, the success of big companies which point out the amazing results yielded by their focus on digital marketing will definitely encourage this segment. It has already been said that social media has changed PR. We can now safely say that the digital aspect has also changed marketing and given the number of people reached through a well designed and implemented online campaign it is no wonder many brands try to use it to its full potential. In the end, a brand needs to be where its consumers are and the world is definitely spending a lot of time online.
Public Relations companies that have worked with L’oreal include 5WPR, Alison Brod PR & Allison+Partners.
