L’Oreal will expand a media ownership strategy it piloted in Mexico to other Spanish-speaking countries to generate first-party cookies from its customer base.
The idea is similar to sponsored content, but instead of working with a brand-name media company on a story package, for the past year L’Oreal has developed fiufiu, a kind of pop-up media brand that turns out social media aggregated lists, influencer columns and work by the content generation startup Cultura Colectiva.
Fiufiu has a website and a Facebook presence. During some months it generates unique visitor numbers on par with well-known beauty magazines, said L’Oreal Hispanic countries CMO Andres Amezquita.
The company could generate page views and engagement if it paired social influencer campaigns with beauty magazine sponsored content deals, but with fiufiu L’Oreal gets first-party cookies and the opportunities to request email addresses that come with page ownership.
“Part of our programmatic approach is to have a lot of data and understand our consumers,” Amezquita said. “The idea is to be able to have a one-on-one conversation at the scale of mass communication, but to do that in the current environment, we need to capture cookies.”
Recent policy changes at the government and operating system levels, such as GDPR in Europe and Apple’s Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention, block access to cookie data for marketers.
Younger customers, who make up most of the social-driven L’Oreal site, also respond better to in-article recommendations than the hard sell of ads on the page, Amezquita said. and every page is another chance to gather an email address or send someone to a L’Oreal product page.
Consumer brands need first-party cookies to advance their online advertising. Since ad tech companies that do audience targeting or retargeting are losing access to first-party data, brands will need to bring their own data to continue running data-driven campaigns.
For instance, L’Oreal can use fiufiu to generate retargeting audiences and extrapolate its first-party data through lookalike models scaled for programmatic, Amezquita said.
“If you look at industry right now, it’s a moment where content, CRM and digital advertising are becoming one,” he said.
