If data is king at L’Oréal, journalist Decca Aitkenhead, in her interview with the beauty brand’s chief digital and marketing officer Asmita Dubey, explains why the recently crowned Global Marketer of the Year is the queen.
Asmita Dubey woke up on her 50th birthday in February and said to herself, “OK, you’re at this juncture in life. What are you going to do next?” Hours later, she found out she had been named Global Marketer of the Year by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).
“Where does the award rank in terms of career achievements? First answer, very high. I’m very proud. Second answer?” She pauses to allow a wry smile. “When I was 13, I wanted to be the prime minister of India. So ….”
Many world leaders would envy the L’Oréal chief digital marketing officer’s $14.6 billion budget, bigger than the GDP of dozens of countries. With 37 international household-name brands — Garnier, Kiehl’s, Kérastase, Lancôme, and Maybelline to name just a few — L’Oréal Groupe is one of the world’s largest beauty companies and has been a marketing superpower longer than Dubey has been alive. “Because You’re Worth It,” was the very first beauty ad campaign she remembers seeing as a child.
A statistician by training, Dubey studied mathematics, computer science, and statistics at Delhi University, followed by a master’s in marketing economics and management, before beginning her career in advertising. “But I soon asked to move into digital,” she says. Her boss asked her why. “Because they do a lot of numbers. And I think I’m good at that.” She wasn’t wrong.
The WFA award honored her role in L’Oréal Groupe’s three consecutive years of double-digit growth. “We’ve had very successful years.” This block-busting period coincided with her appointment in 2021 as CDMO — but, when I point this out, she immediately replies, “I was not correlating those two things.” This will be the only occasion in our entire conversation when Dubey politely declines to extrapolate a logical conclusion from the data.
In data we trust
Measuring data, she firmly believes, is the key to success in a rapidly changing digital media landscape driven by augmented marketing that combines traditional marketing techniques with state-of-the-art technology. “We measure everything because we are in permanent transformation. If we don't measure, we don't know if we are failing or succeeding.”
Marketers from a more traditional creative background may struggle to keep pace with the rate of technological change, but Dubey is pushing to go even faster. “In our typical mathematical style, we have created a standardized index, which is a combination of views and engagement.” She chuckles. “Some people are like, ‘Oh my God, these guys never give up.’ I can say with a lot of confidence, we are measuring more than anyone else.”
I can say with a lot of confidence, we are measuring more than anyone else.
In Dubey’s vision of marketing, science, and technology are indivisible from creativity. “The new generation of marketeers have to use both the left brain and the right brain, because creativity and technology have never come together as close as they are today.”
She references the 3D and CGI artists who created Maybelline’s recent mascara and lipstick campaigns. In one, a car appeared to drive through Paris, painting red lipstick on the street. Another showed a London Underground train appearing to have its eyelashes coated with a giant mascara wand.
“We were the first ones to do that in the industry. And we need to be the first ones to do it, because innovation is so much in the company’s DNA. So, it has to be disruptive; it has to be surprising. This means we need a new generation of creators who have to be comfortable with the ideation, but also the tooling and the efficiency, and how all of that comes together.” Her advice to anyone starting out in marketing today is, “Train your muscles on both sides of your brain.”
Beauty is now in the tech business
Beauty tech is central to Dubey’s ambition for marketing’s future. L’Oréal Paris’ Beauty Genius, a generative AI beauty consultant, allows users to try its cosmetic range on their own face virtually. Its Skin Genius assistant offers a diagnostic analysis service for personalized skin care. “We have 100 million service users now, and we are scaling them on more than 70 retailer’s websites, as well as using them offline as an in-store service.”
Growing up in India, followed by 12 years in China — becoming L’Oréal China’s CMO in 2013, then CMO for Asia-Pacific in 2016 — Dubey witnessed an emerging middle class in the world’s two largest markets growing in affluence and digital maturity. She also saw the growth potential for social commerce.
We need to be the first ones to do it, because innovation is so much in the company’s DNA.
“The traditional door-to-door delivery business culture is shifting to WhatsApp,” she says. “So there is a huge opportunity in markets like India and Latin America. And TikTok commerce is big for us in Indonesia and Vietnam, so we are definitely betting on social commerce. But it’s not the only channel.”
The enduring power of legacy media was proven, she points out, by CeraVe’s showstopping Super Bowl TV ad in February — a spoof boardroom pitch by the actor Michael Cera, pretending to be the eponymous brain behind the skin care brand. In fact, the “Ve” stands for multivesicular emulsion (MVE) technology and “Cera” refers to “ceramides,” not Michael Cera. Its combined amplification with YouTube garnered millions of views and comments. “It’s safe to say we are betting on a mix of channels.”
Responsible AI requires human intervention
Her faith in driving change by measuring data even extends to sustainability. In addition to exploring with Google how to measure CO2 emissions at the data center level, L’Oréal has incorporated a software program that automatically measures the carbon impact of digital media campaigns. Dubey explains that, “By doing this, we’re reducing the CO2 emission for hundreds and hundreds of paid activations globally.”
If a campaign’s performance data contradicts Dubey’s prediction, does she ever trust her gut and let it overrule the numbers? “People in advertising have been doing copy-testing for 50 years. They constantly ask themselves, ‘What part of it do I want to change, and what part of it do I want to take a risk with?’ That is not a new question. These are now data-driven decisions, but they’re not data determined.”
The challenge, she says, is to keep improving the quality of the data. “The modeling has to be at a franchise level. It has to be weekly. It has to be long-term. We have to keep improving the quality of that data, so that when we make a data-driven decision, it is better.”
You cannot say, “Oh, I use this cream and it really works,” and put an AI face there. We will not use gen AI to enhance product benefits.
Another digital challenge today is ethical. To correct AI’s tendency for racial bias, for example, L’Oréal worked with external experts and EU AI guidelines to formulate its own seven Responsible AI Principles.
Dubey adds, “Any work we do on AI has to pass this filter. The first one is that there will always be a human intervention to see that the biases are OK or not. The second is that it will be inclusive by design. For example, our skin diagnosis tool uses 20,000 different images from everywhere around the world.”
She also strictly forbids using AI-generated imagery to illustrate a product’s benefits. “You cannot say, ‘Oh, I use this cream and it really works,’ and put an AI face there. We will not use gen AI to enhance hair, face, and skin, but we are embracing this tech to augment our content creation.”
If her competitors prove less scrupulous, might she, in time, be forced to review her rule? “I hope that subject will be regulated, because we all believe that we need that. I think regulation is coming. But we will continue to hold ourselves to our standards. And there has always been competition, and we thrive on that.”
Brand building with Gen Z
L’Oréal is now spearheading the beauty industry’s race into virtual reality. Consumer enthusiasm hasn’t yet matched the public’s embrace for life online, but when it does — and Dubey firmly believes it will — her competitors may find she has already taken over. Maybelline New York and L’Oréal Professionnel have partnered with Ready Player Me, a cross-game avatar platform, to offer hair and makeup styling for video game avatars.
“Maybe you want purple hair or red hair, and this is your moment to do that. And, as the No. 1 beauty company in the world by revenue, we would like to be the one who serves those expressions and empower them.” It is about consumer engagement and brand building with Gen Z.
Dubey has no shortage of answers to her own 50th birthday question: “So what do you do next?” Is becoming prime minister of India still one of your goals? She laughs.
“There’s always time. I’m only 50.”
