L'Oreal takes 'retailtainment' to the next level at Cannes

CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 09: Li Yuchun (Chris Lee) attends the screening of "Yomeddine" during the 71st annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 9, 2018 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Kering)Show less

Chinese actress and pop star Li Yuchun glides down the hallway of Cannes’ Hotel Martinez in a tuxedo-inspired Jean Paul Gaultier gown and blue-gray pixie haircut, with a pack of L’Oreal videographers trotting backward to stay out of the frame.

After striking a few poses on the marble staircase, she heads for the red carpet. The footage is rushed to L’Oreal’s editing suite, where dozens of editors and producers stitch together clips to post everywhere from Instagram to China’s Weibo within hours of the shoot.

This is how the world’s biggest beauty brand promotes itself in the smartphone age. With foot traffic sliding in drugstores, eyeballs shifting from televisions to mobile screens and China’s digitally savvy consumers driving growth, L’Oreal pulled out all the stops at the world’s most watched film festival.

L’Oreal Paris, the company’s flagship consumer brand, is using its unrivaled scale to fund ever-bigger events, including a live talk show on the Cannes beach with film stars like Jane Fonda and Isabelle Adjani. Some segments were produced in Mandarin, hosted by American-Chinese TV star Hung Huang and published on Alibaba’s TMall.

“Cannes is a spectacular opportunity for us to produce a lot of content, and this year we wanted to take it even further,” said L’Oreal Paris’s global brand president, Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou, speaking from a two-story video studio built for the occasion on the Cannes beach. “The more we can combine accessibility and direct contact with consumers with the aspirational nature and beauty of cinema, the better.”

The studio, backed by yachts crossing the Mediterranean harbour and equipped with a vintage convertible for capturing models tossing their hair in the breeze, marked a change of scenery from the celebrity magazines and nightly news shows that L’Oreal used to rely on to get out its marketing message.

Staying in the spotlight with a constant flow of content over Facebook, Instagram and Chinese networks like Weibo and WeChat has become a business imperative for L’Oreal as it navigates the decline of traditional media and a wave of retail closures. The Chinese market, already L’Oreal’s second biggest after the US, with about  $2.6 billion in sales last year, is undergoing what CEO Jean-Paul Agon calls a “particularly violent” shift to e-commerce, and online sales made up more than a third of sales last year.

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“L’Oreal can’t just depend on their reputation,” said Delphine Dion, marketing professor at Essec Business School near Paris, citing mounting competition from homegrown competitors in China, social-media-driven upstarts like LVMH’s Fenty Beauty by Rihanna and South Korean beauty brands like Mizon. “They have to keep making buzz online or else they’ll lose out.”

L’Oreal’s partnerships with Instagram influencers and beauty-blogging YouTube stars have helped drive booming makeup sales, Ms Dion said, so it makes sense for the company to step up its digital efforts with more established representatives like Julianne Moore and Ms Li.

In the flurry of videos L’Oreal produced during the festival, red-carpet struts were interspersed with product demos and interviews with the brand’s ambassadors. And L’Oreal promises viewers an instant reward: in one Instagram story, red-carpet snapshots of Ms Moore were followed by a suggestion to swipe up for a 20 per cent discount on glitter cream.

The combination of staging elaborate events, publicising them via social media and easing the path to points of sale, or "retailtainement" is showing signs of success. When L’Oreal launched a collaboration with designer Olivier Rousteing and fashion brand Balmain last year, video ads linked to Alibaba’s TMall, driving sales of 40,000 lipsticks in the first month.

“L’Oreal is very clever about doing what we call all-media distribution,” said TV host and magazine editor Mr Huang, referring to the company’s strategy of producing its own content and handing it over to a range of outlets. That helps the brand get around a common problem for marketers in China - that media owners block links to content from rival platforms when users share it, making exclusive deals less effective. “You get a lot more exposure this way.”

Other brands are taking note, stepping up their Cannes marketing efforts. “The difficult part isn’t finding brands to work with, it’s knowing which ones to refuse,” Ms Li said.

If China gets special treatment in L’Oreal’s online efforts - as with the Mandarin edition of the Cannes talk show - it’s not only because of the scale of the opportunity, but because lessons learned in the most advanced market for e-commerce can be exported around the world. One takeaway: mixing entertainment and retailing works.

“It’s about producing content that brings excitement to consumers,” Mr Angeloglou said, lowering his voice as cameras rolled for an interview between Mr Hung and the French actress Louise Bourgoin.

French actress Louise Bourgoin.

Mr Angeloglou passed a fake bathroom where the actress Leila Bekhti had just shot a clip about her favourite eyeliner. The green room was packed with editing bays and monitoring screens where producers scoured footage from the red carpet for the most glamorous moments.

“It’s really on a huge scale,” Mr Angeloglou said.

“But when you are able to do something unexpected, the amount of engagement you can create is really worth it.”