At Shoptalk Europe, Mark Lallemand, CMO of Western Europe at L’Oréal, described the next phase of the company of AI and the digital strategy of the company. The message was concentrated: AI is no longer a test. It is at the heart of how L’Oréal is building and offers brand experiences.
“It’s no longer experimentation,” said Lallemand at the event. “It is a marketing transformation. We build, with AI at the heart of brand interactions. ”
One reason is speed. “We used to overthrow campaigns in weeks,” he said. “Now we do it in hours.” This acceleration is possible by the L’Oréal Creaitech laboratory, which operates AI to generate localized visuals and campaign assets from simple text prompts using models, including Google’s Imagen 3 and Gemini. This helped the company to scale up localized and creative messages for Tiktok and Instagram in 20 markets in EMEA.
“We can take the same product stroke and place it perfectly in a Japanese garden, in a lively Parisian street or in any other relevant setting,” said Antoine Castex, group data and the IA corporate architect in L’Oréal, in April 2025 interview With Google.
This capacity has contributed to reducing costs and accelerating the storyboard, the generation of concepts and the visual tests, according to Thomas Alves Machado, the world director of the content of L’Oréal for a generative AI. The next phase will bring a movement in the mixture. Using Google’s Veo 2, L’Oréal will convert static visuals to eight -second animated clips, with video and audio elements formed on brand -specific styles.
The same principles of AI apply to the media strategy of L’Oréal. L’Oréal is currently using an AI tool called Tidal to automate paid media on platforms without human entrance. A deployment in the Nordic in 2023 showed a 22% increase in media efficiency and an improvement of 14% of the efficiency of the campaigns, according to internal landmarks shared by the company. Lallemand stressed that these efficiency does not concern budget cuts. “It’s not about spending more, it’s about spending better,” he said.
Lallemand said the goal was to reduce the distance between inspiration and purchase of the product. “We push the limits of large-scale personalization,” he said, highlighting the use of dynamic announcements targeting and creative optimization in real time.
All of this is above the L’Oréal, Oréal transformation plan, launched in 2022 and extended in 2024, which aims to centralize, data and creative infrastructure. According to the call of the April 2025 results of the company, the new system has recently been implemented in China and will take place in the United Kingdom and Australia by the end of 2025.
“We want to empower the markets with a common system,” said Lallemand.
In 2023, more than 60% of the company’s digital media budget went to social platforms. This figure continued to increase in 2024, although no exact percentage was shared. “It is not a question of spending more, it is a question of spending better,” said Lallemand.
In addition, AI transforms product innovation. On the product side, L’Oréal works with IBM to develop a personalized generative AI formulation foundation model, announced in January 2025. “This partnership will extend the speed and scale of our innovation and reformulation pipeline,” said Stéphane Ortiz, responsible for Innovation Trades and Development of Products at the Oréal Research and Innovation, in a press release.
The objective is to use AI to analyze ingredient data, reduce energy and material waste and support brand sustainability objectives. The system should allow more than 4,000 researchers worldwide to create and reformulate products more quickly.
Oréal agental AI tools also play a role in the way the company manages visibility and control over retail platforms. During the call for the results of the company’s first quarter on April 17, CEO Nicolas Hieronimus said that the brands of Oréal like Redken and Kerastase are now officially listed on Amazon and Sephora.com, helping the company cleanse unauthorized lists and normalize prices. As the brand explodes the lists in digital windows, the AI agent is used to automate content updates, monitor the quality of the list and ensure consistency between regions – tasks that once required manual monitoring but can now be executed in real time.
Lallemand added that L’Oréal is now “on a scale of what works”. He said the company hires and trains around AI workflows, with new interfunctional teams working in creative, performance and data operations.
“We are changing the role of marketing specialists within the organization,” he said. “We are building new teams with new processes, powered by new tools.”
