Tag: LOreal

L’Oreal Taps AR To Let You Try On 64 Red-Carpet Looks From Cannes

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
L’Oréal continues to embrace augmented reality technologies to promote its beauty products. As part of a cross-promotion with the Cannes Film Festival, the cosmetic giant is allowing users of its popular YouCam Makeup app to project 64 glamourous red carpet makeup looks from the festival onto their own face and learn makeup skills. In addition, the app also shared livestream directly from the event, hosted by beauty influencer and L’Oréal’s brand ambassador Liza Lash.

What Brands Need To Do
Increasingly we are seeing beauty brands incorporating AR technology into their services to optimize their customer experiences. L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app and Covergirl’s BeautyU app are good examples of how beauty brands can leverage the advanced capabilities of smartphones to provide extra utility throughout the consumer journey. With Apple introducing mobile AR to iOS apps with the launch of ARKit, brands should now be more even incentivized to explore AR so as to add a little reality-bending magic to their mobile experience.

 

Source: Glossy

L’Oréal Launches Beauty Gifter Bot For Personalized Gift-Giving

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
L’Oréal has quietly launched a Facebook Messenger bot that aims to act as a gift-giving liaison for personalized makeup and skin care gifts. Working with Automat Technologies, a Montreal-based startup, the beauty giant created the Beauty Gifter bot which asks both the gift giver and the recipient questions in order to pick out the perfect beauty gift. For example, the gift-giver can set a price range of the gift while the recipient will answer a series of questions about their skin tone and type and beauty preferences. Once answered, the bot will then generate several gift options for the gift giver to choose from.

What Brands Need To Do
This is a cool example of brands using AI-powered chatbot to optimize the online customer experience that they offer. This bot not only creates a functional use case for users to engage with, but also enables L’Oréal to gather more customer data on their beauty and skin care preferences for future targeting. For brands seeking to reach the 1.2 billion active users on Facebook Messenger, a chatbot that creates true value for users will be your best bet.

The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good showcase of our expertise. If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, please contact Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Header image courtesy of L’Oréal

L’Oréal Canada Taps Shoppable Video To Enhance Influencer Marketing

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Aiming to accelerate its ecommerce growth and enhance its influencer marketing program, L’Oréal Canada is teaming up with Toronto-based mobile tech firm dubdub to leverage its  “dubcandy” app to convert viewers and boost online sales. The app supports shoppable video content that can link out to retailer websites, and L’Oréal is looking to use it to set up a new compensation model for influencer campaigns based on conversions.

What Brands Should Do
WIth the recent explosion of makeup tutorial videos and online influencers, many beauty brands are figuring out the best way to integrate influencer marketing into their existing content strategies. This move by L’Oréal suggests that one way to do so may be combining it with shoppable content. Not only does it allows L’Oréal to monetize video content across their influencer network, it also provides a quantitative way to measure the performance of their influencer content.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience working with beauty and CPG clients to create and implement retail experiences that utilize social and influencer content. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square, featuring a “Colorcast” digital sculpture that displays NYX’s social content in fascinating, color-coordinated combinations, is a proud showcase of our team’s work in this space and elevated NYX as one of the most innovative digital beauty brands of 2016 named by WWD. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop an updated retail strategy and implement digital-driven solutions to modernize your retail experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: PressWire

L’Oréal Launches Virtual Reality Salon For Hair Stylist Training

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
L’Oréal has found an interesting way to use VR technologies to improve its Matrix Academy program, a branded training program for hairstylists. Working with VR software startup 8i, L’Oréal will be offering hairdressing classes via a room-scale volumetric VR experience, which allows trainees to walk around the room, view the hairdo from different angles, and even step into the instructor’s virtual body and learn how to style the model’s hair from a first-person view. The goal is to enable aspiring hairstylists to learn the latest hair techniques and hone their skills without having to travel for their training.

What Brands Should Do
This initiative showcases a rare enterprise use case for brands to leverage burgeoning VR technologies to modernize their training programs. Moreover, this VR initiative also points to a future that beauty-related branded content can evolve into. In recent years, makeup tutorials and product review videos have gained significant traction on sites such as YouTube and Instagram, giving rise to a slew of beauty vloggers and influencers. The possibility of extending such educational VR programs to let consumers learn makeup skills in an immersive virtual experience would be a truly exciting way to attract beauty customers.

The Lab currently has four VR headsets — an Oculus Rift, an HTC Vive, and two Samsung Gear VRs — ready for demos. Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood, so come by the Lab and ask for a VR demo to get a hands-on experience and figure out how your brand can use it to excite and engage with consumers.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Image Credit: 8i Medium post

Covergirl’s New App Enables Virtual Makeup Try-On

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
To help drugstore shoppers pick out the right shade of lipstick or eyeshadow, makeup brand Covergirl has launched a new app to help them try on products virtually before buying. Similar to L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app, Covergirl’s BeautyU app uses facial scanning and tracking to identify users’ skin tones and overlay makeup looks in real time. The Maryland-based company aims to provide their customers with a complementary tool that may help break the try-on barrier that hinders purchases in drugstore browsing.

What Brands Need To Do
With this new app, Covergirl provides a great example of how brands can leverage the proliferation and advanced capabilities of smartphones to provide extra utility throughout the consumer journey. Given that smartphone users are spending over 85% of their time in apps rather than web browsers, it makes sense for brands to develop branded apps to engage with consumers, enhance their shopping experiences, and move them down the sales funnel.

 

Source: Digiday

Header image courtesy of BeautyU app

L’Oréal Taps Into Augmented Reality With “Makeup Genius” App

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
L’Oréal hit a homerun with the launch of a branded mobile app called Makeup Genius, which uses augmented reality (or, more precisely, mixed reality) and facial tracking technology to let users virtually try on L’Oréal cosmetics and, if happy with the simulated results, order the products right in the app. It utilizes dynamic tracking so that even as users move their heads around, the virtual  layer of makeup stays in the right places. The app has been especially successful in China, which brought in 4.7 million of its 14 million total downloads.

What Brands Should Do
In order to reach today’s mobile-first consumers, who are reportedly spending over 85% of their time on smartphones in apps rather than web browsers, it is important for brands to develop apps that offer true value to the consumers and function as new digital touchpoints to engage with the target audience.

 

Source: AdAge

L’Oreal Targets Makeup Based On Your Outfit

Posted on by Lab Team

We’ve seen product recommendations highly targeted online, but not so offline. Glamour is trying to bring product recommendations OOH, piloting kiosks in subways which recommend products after detecting the colors of your outfit. While the targeting parameters are novel, it remains to be seen if shoppers open to purchases in these pop-up style environments.