L’Oréal: creating authentic digital content with vlogger partnerships

L’Oréal has teamed up with five beauty bloggers in the UK to shake up its digital content offering, in a move which follows calls earlier this year from its chief digital officer to make advertising ‘less interruptive’.

The L’Oréal UK campaign, dubbed ‘The Beauty Squad’, will see the global beauty giant collaborating with the five UK-based vloggers to create various forms of ‘always on’ content across social media channels, including Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

The five bloggers, Emily Canham, Kaushal, Patricia Bright, Ruth Crilly and Victoria Magrath, boast a combined reach of over 5.5 million, according to L’Oréal, and will work with L’Oréal to curate content of an interactive, social nature.

Better immersion

The Beauty Squad campaign follows Lubomira Rochet, the group’s head of digital, saying earlier this year that beauty brands need to reinvent how they interact with consumers online: “We need to reinvent the experience and we need to make it less interruptive, more immersive, more rewarding, more personalised.”

The new campaign will be UK-focussed, the company says, with the bloggers set to be its “digital faces” across its cosmetics, skin and hair care categories. Cosmetics Design spoke to Adrien Koskas, general manager for the L’Oréal Paris brand in the UK, about the new campaign.

Authentic communication: multichannel

Koskas is clear that consumers now demand any beauty content online to feel authentic and genuine.

Our customers are heading more and more to social media to find advice and get more knowlege - beauty products, reviews, application techniques - and for us its important to be present in that field with an authentic voice,” he explains.

One way the GM believes L’Oréal can achieve this continued authenticity - even as an explicitly branded presence within the content - is to be multichannel in approach.

Content will be hosted on our bloggers’ channels and on our own channels. It’s very important that the content lives beyond our channel - to be credible it needs to be on theirs too, to show that it’s genuine and the bloggers really do love the product.”

Agile and responsive

Koskas explains that the content will be responsive to the situation, including ‘takeovers’ by the bloggers of the L’Oréal social media accounts for events like London Fashion Week.

We’re very agile and we’ll play with different platforms depending on the format of the event - for live events, we’ll use Snapchat and Twitter; for more curated content, we’ll look to vlogs.”

Diversity in the forefront

Koskas explained that the campaign is consciously multicultural, following on from the brand’s recently lauched #YoursTruly campaign for its True Match foundation, which, it claims, features a range of tones that can cater to 98% of the UK’s population.

At L’Oréal Paris, we really want to embrace diversity. Beauty doesn’t have a skin tone, and every woman is worth it. It was very important for us to show a team of influencers to represent that,” confirms Koskas.