Ep 32: On AI, sharing and scaling with Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal

In episode 32 of the Better Marketing Pod, David Wheldon speaks to L'Oréal's CMO, Marketer of 2023 and Global Marketer Week speaker, Asmita Dubey.

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Transcript

David Wheldon (host) 0:40

Welcome everybody to another episode of WFA's, Better Marketing this time live from Brooklyn where I'm staying with some friends on my travels. And today I've got the absolute delight of interviewing Asmita Dubey , the new global marketer of the year. Welcome Asmita. How are you?

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 0:59

Hello, David. I'm very well, and thank you very much. Very happy to be here chatting with you.

David Wheldon (host) 1:05

Well, I'm delighted to have you and, and I know all of your team will be delighted that you take this honour on their behalf because as we've seen in many a time the great job of a CMO is to lead a wonderful bunch of people and to get this kind of recognition is really great for all of you.

1:24

So tell me a little bit about how you manage your team, your style, your structure , how they're going to be feeling as you celebrate this success?

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 1:32

In the role of the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer. My job is the transformation of marketing and that transformation in today's world , because the pace of transformation is accelerating, we have to perform while we transform. And in that sense we have a great talented group of more than 5,000 digital and e-commerce experts in the company. And they are performing while they are transforming all the time. So my focus is on six S's. Strategy, whatever we do, we have to have clarity in terms of where we are going. Skills, we keep upskilling all our marketeers, digital experts , e-commerce experts , we keep bringing new skills and upskilling them all the time. Speed to do that with agility. Share so we are very good at sharing best practices everywhere around the world. And scale because it is with scale that we bring impact. Then on personal leadership we just did our Myers Briggs tests and, and I'm INTJ, I'm somebody who loves <pause> you have done the test yourself?

David Wheldon (host) 2:53

Many a times. Yes.

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 2:56

<laugh>. It's always interesting to do it and to do it with our teams. Well, that's who I am. I love this combination of math and magic , the combination of the use of left brain and right brain bringing creativity and technology together.

David Wheldon (host) 3:13

How magnificent. And, as do I , you share an agency background. So I know you started out agency side before you joined, I think first L'Oréal in China. Can you pull out a little bit what you learned from your agency days and , and how you see that now and how you are building effective partnerships? Because the thing I observe is all those of us that have worked inside agencies tend to get the best work out of agencies because we know how to. Can you, can you talk just a little bit about that?

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 3:49

Absolutely. So I started working in 1997 in advertising, and that , that is, I , that is where I wanted to work. Uh, and I spent about , 15, 16 years across different holding companies. And in 2013, I joined L'Oréal China as the CMO , and then from there on to APAC , and then Paris. I've been in Paris for the last seven years. What did I specifically learn? And then what, as L'Oréal group, have we been doing very well, I think the two join in this conversation. And we, when we talk about our success, the success of L'Oréal is based on a few pillars. I'll give you a background on that. We have a very unique model of business. We are pure players in beauty, so we do only beauty and we do beauty across price points , across geographies, across channels. We have a very strong innovation , you know R&I, but overall an innovation in our DNA , we , we work with the power of 37 global brands. We are championing beauty tech and digital, and we have a very strong culture and values. Our teams are very, very engaged so that is internally who we are . And then the success of our transformation and our innovation roadmaps are very much with a very large ecosystem of partners. And when I say very large ecosystem of partners, let us start with the big tech the GAF fam with which we have world class joint business plans. So world class JVPs , uh with the likes of Google, Meta , Amazon , TikTok, Snapchat and other players. And, to give you an example, we have the largest CPG research program globally in terms of all different players with Google. Then when it comes to agency holding companies, we work with them for decades. They have been our very strong partners. To give you an example, the tagline, I'm L'Oréal Paris is the number one beauty brand in the world. And it represents women empowerment , science and Parisian elegance. And the tagline, because you are worth it, which is now because we are worth it , was something that a copywriter in McCann wrote back in 1971. So our partnerships are very deep and very long standing. And we have strong MSAs with our holding companies, and they share a lot of our values. So whether it is about how we do responsible advertising, how we have an influencer charter how we are thinking in terms of trustworthy AI, all that are shared values with our agency partners. Third, we are very active when it comes to a new kind of ecosystem of partners. And when I'm talking about new ecosystem of partners. These are partners when we run , website programs we run more than 500 websites for our brand dotcom and more than 250 direct to commerce websites. Then we have new partners, whether it is , Valtech , photon, sapien, sitecore, these are new partners. When we are shifting to new marketing, like advocacy and influence there we have a new set of partners and tools, companies like Tracker, influential when we are talking about data-driven marketing. Then again, we kind of embrace a new set of partners there. Which are either referred by the big tech companies, companies like Jellyfish, Media monks, convert you , who work very, very closely with us to make the transformation. I will talk about two, two more kind of partner when we talk of Gen AI. You know, everybody's talking about generative AI now, and we have already started working with a suite of partners, both on the technology side, on who's doing the llms, but also in service models, whether it is with Publicis Bria or WPP Open or brand track group, pencil ai . So we have a very large ecosystem of partners that keep on growing. And then we have an open innovation system, so an open innovation accelerator in France at Station F , where we have almost 60 seats for startups. And we have Bold, which is our business opportunities for L'Oréal development, where we actually invest in startups like Rembrand which is a product placement company, which is doing product placement based on AI technology. So if you look at all of this, of course, on, on many different ways, we are partnering and there are hundreds of partners who are part of the journey with us.

David Wheldon (host) 9:05

Well , and , and your excitement is palpable, which is always a delight to see. Tell me a little bit about how in all of that context, global, local works , because the shifting seed seeds of local, where I believe you described your people, everybody tells me L'Oréal is unique when it comes to this, but of course every company is unique, but what's your approach to structure? What's the day in , day out experience?

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 9:33

Yeah, sure. I would say that we are a metrics organization. So we have almost 90,000 people who work in a metrics organization. And that metrics , on one hand, it is based on global zones and countries. And on the other hand, we are operating with the multi divisions, which is four divisions, consumer products division, luxury division, L'Oréal dermatological beauty and Professional products division and brands. And our brand presidents report to the division heads who are the business heads. So from a marketing point of view, we have global brand presidents who report to the divisions. And then we have marketing teams in the countries, which are the operational marketing who do the activation. If I take that to, to the CDMO function, which is Chief Digital and Marketing Organization here we also mirror the same metrics organization. And here I had mentioned before, we have more than 5,000 digital and e-commerce experts and the way they are working. I would say overall, our strategy as a group is to be strategically centralized and operationally decentralized. And in that strategically centralized and operationally decentralized model. For the CDMO function specifically, first we have common set of first strategic frameworks for everybody. We have a CDM mobile globally that is adapted by zones and by divisions. And with that, we also try to have a common currency, the language that we speak and the way we describe things on what we want to do. Uh, then we have a common set of values. I mentioned it before. So how do we do responsible advertising? How do we do trustworthy AI? What is our influencer charter? And how do we interact with influencers? We also have common factories, factories of operationally. When we run websites these are website factories. When we create you know, content, digital asset management tools, these are global and therefore rolled out globally. When we are talking about D to C tech, the direct to commerce websites and how we manage them, these are global in nature. So there are some global operations and global factories and programs, and a lot of global programs on which we work. We also have global JBPs, we just spoke about them, and their four, KPIs that are standard and that are measurable, that are in a dashboard that are golden rules so that everyone knows where to go and how to operate. And the last commonality that we have overall, we have common beauty tech data platform. So our data models are more and more common, and we have one of the richest database in beauty which brings in all our scientific data , as well as data from different areas of services and all. So all those are common. And then when we come to the countries that is where all the activation lies. So good ideas come from everywhere, and good ideas come from countries. Uh, after all in this matrix organization it is the country and the brand that is closest to the consumer. Uh, so they are the ones that are bringing us a lot of insight on our 2.9 billion addressable consumers, whether they are in emerging markets or developed markets, whether they are Gen Z or boomers , whether they're using skincare or fragrances. So what we do very well is then from there we use those best practices and we scale those best practices all around because we have very strong communities across these functions. And we are an organization that loves to interact. Our culture is about exchanging about one-to-one exchanges, about group exchanges, about workshopping meeting, sharing successes. So that's how we work and succeed in the metrics.

David Wheldon (host) 13:47

That's fantastic. So the the sharing and scaling bit of that I think is probably worth discussing a little bit further. 'cause it's easy to say and it's still difficult to do. Hhow do you vet, because obviously in your position, you're also wanting to make sure that the right things get to the right places at the right time, and , and therefore you've gotta have some guardrails around it, I suppose. But can you tell us a little bit about that? Because the two or three things I'm really fascinated here is the speed that you are moving at to keep an ethical framework in place, I think is tricky. You know, the , you were very early adopters of influencers and I think lead in many ways the market on how to use influence smartly and how, again , to put guardrails around that, but I , I guess it's this dichotomy of speed and scale and guardrails to keep all of that. I know that's a long question, but I think it's a fascinating area.

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 14:47

One of the ways of making this work to bringing things at speed, but then scaling them is because for the last 115 years innovation has been in our DNA , we love to seize what is starting. So that is in the culture of the company. And we have three pillars of innovation, science, technology, and creativity. So we are innovating across all of this, how do we stay agile is exactly that, because innovation is in the DNA of the company. So every time we see something that is starting. We, we love to seize it. And how we seize it is through pilots and through experimentation, through this open innovation system, through partnerships, through strategizing it well, and here I can pivot to what we are doing, for example, on generative AI. So, so generative AI is, we are at a new frontier of technology with generative AI. And we, everyone is exploring it. And to build the L'Oréal group approach we have created a generative AI task force . And the head of the generative AI taskforce is somebody who is working very closely with the R&I, technology, digital marketing, and human resources, because we feel that that the technology is going to impact all these functions of the organization. So she's the head of the taskforce. And then when it comes to marketing we believe that augmented marketing is the future of marketing. So, so while it has been augmenting with purpose, with multis, sensorial experiences with data, and now we believe it is going to be first strategically, we believe that it is going to be augmented by generative AI. So strategically we define that what are the use cases that we are gonna work on. So we are gonna work on content, we are going to work on services because this is going to create a new generation of beauty tech services for us. We are going to work on consumer care, because consumer care will really be enhanced with generative AI is what we believe, and we see that around us. We are going to work on search, and we are going to work on managing intelligence of insights teams and all. So that, that is the, the kind of strategic framework for generative AI that we agree on. And therefore, from there on everybody, like we start to doing pilots in terms of with brands and with countries. So we already defined that. Let me give you an example of content. On content, we created a generative AI beauty content lab called CREATech because technology is coming to creativity. And with this lab, across divisions, which is all four divisions, we started working together. And in the last six months, we have tested more than 20 LLM models. We have created more than thousand images. Uh, and we are working with more than one partner here, like I mentioned, we are working with Publicis Bria , with WPP Open with the brand track group. We are working with all the tech partners whether it is Google or Microsoft or some of the others. So we start to pilot it like that, and then we start to see the results. And as we see the results in terms of content, if I were to say and I'm going to finish on that for this particular point, we already start to see that, that everything that we do in terms of these images needs a creative direction. So that there is a combination of creativity and technology. We start to see that we can really scale image production in social and e-commerce. So we are now thinking of the architecture and business models of how that could scale. We start to see that probably there is some merit in understanding 3D custom models for products. Because starting from design all the way to activation, it starts coming in. So that's how we start learning on the subject and scaling and creating models so that everybody from the organization can start benefiting.

David Wheldon (host) 19:16

And , and perhaps to bring this further to life, you could give us a specific example of something that's benefited the consumer. So for instance, I could really do with your help and generative AI, I'm sure is even now working out on how to make me look less ugly. But have you got specific things that you can talk about? Because I think that's where this really comes to life.

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 19:40

Generative AI?

David Wheldon (host) 19:41

Yeah, yeah

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 19:41

On everything, we are the number one beauty company in the world, and we believe beauty is an essential human need. So it is a very, very individual need, but it also deeply social. So, as a group, we have decided that we will not use AI generated hair or face to enhance our product benefits in external representation of beauty. Yes, we'll use it for ideas generation, we will use it for inspiration on new codes of beauty. We would use it for storyboarding. We would use it for social and e-commerce. So one of the examples that I can use is that we start seeing, and again, generative AI is still in a controlled experimentation phase in our company, but we start to see that it, it saves us a lot of time in terms of storyboarding ideas between the marketers and the agency partners.

David Wheldon (host) 20:39

And I know you use this phrase of augmented marketing , um, founded on a strong digital core, I think is what you talk about. Now, when I first heard that I, I lent back and I thought, what does that mean? So obviously using all the benefits of tech, but can you, can you talk to that? When , when you're talking about augmented marketing, how do you see that?

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 21:06

So marketing beauty marketing, if we step back a little bit, it has been getting augmented it was getting augmented by purpose. If you see purpose like the consumers uh are shifting, and we want to be more inclusive, more sustainable by design. So there is an augmentation that happens to the way we've been working. It is definitely getting augmented by multi sensorial experiences before we were in the offline world, in the physical world, then we moved to the digital world. And there are so many beauty experiences that we have been reinventing in the digital world , for our consumers be it in the gaming world or the beauty tech services that we are bringing with AR and AI, marketing is also getting augmented by data across business levers . So we speak so much about data-driven marketing, which is an augmentation of how we used to do marketing, because we use data now in the business levers and in decision making . And then when it comes to to generative AI and technologies like AI, definitely, the whole discussion today is that how is it going to augment creativity or augment our employees or create more efficiency, make them save time and put their resources on more strategic tasks. So therefore, we are saying that we are augmenting marketing with the strong beauty tech and digital core. And when we say beauty tech , we are championing beauty tech because beauty tech to us means a new kind of relationship with our consumers. One that is based on technology, data and AI, one that brings more personalization because we believe that in beauty powered by beauty tech , it is, it is actually a shift in our strategy. Because before we used to say that we are about beauty for all, and then we are shifting with personalization, with technology data, and AI to beauty for each, which is powered by beauty tech.

David Wheldon (host) 23:14

Asmita, just a little bit on where you see L'Oréal leading, and perhaps you could give us some examples of how all of this is coming to bear for the customer.

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 23:24

Yeah, sure. Uh, so happy to share that. I think well, we've had a great start to the year. Yeah, we just published our quarter one results, and we are at plus 9.4% year on year . And after three years of consecutive double digit growth. So I would say in terms of of marketing, we are leading across two or three areas. First in terms of deeply connecting with our consumers at the speed of culture. And there, if you see, in terms of entertainment, our brands participated to Super Bowl 2024 in February, our brand CeraVe. They did a great campaign in terms of entertainment where with Michael Cera and, and it was, it was filled with humor because Cera to us means three ceramides which, which protect the skin barrier. But then there was the name of Michael Cera, and Michael Cera was claiming that he's probably the one in who has kind of come up with the CeraVe of the brand. And the whole, there was a whole teaser around it in social media, and in the end it was revealed, and it was very much in the brand DNA, because we said that no actually the heroes are the dermatologists because CeraVe has been made by dermatologists. So it was a very entertaining company campaign. So was Nyx professional makeup who was part of Super Bowl too. We are also doing, beyond entertainment, our brands are very much into causes. So, which is where, again, they're deeply connecting with consumers within the cultural context, because L'Oréal, Paris is the number one beauty brand in the world. And and for decades it has been it has been supporting women empowerment. And one of the biggest proof points of this women empowerment is our program Standup that we work with Hollaback a company which is fighting street harassment. And here , til date we have, we have educated 2.5 million people on what to do. When you see some kind of a street harassment either you face yourself or you see somebody else facing it. So in terms of connecting at the speed of culture with our brands, that is one area because of which we are leading. And the second one is our beauty tech and digital championship. So we are number one in terms of share of voice worldwide, offline, and online. When measured, we are number one in share of influence in beauty globally with all our brands. We are leading in digital sustainability where we are partnering with a French startup Impact plus to measure and reduce the CO2 emission of our digital campaigns everywhere around the world, we are also pioneering beauty tech services. So when we say beauty tech services for example, we are , we are doing virtual try ons or skin diagnosis. And one example is how Maybelline is partnering with Microsoft Teams. And now if you go to Microsoft Teams, you can choose one of the 12 virtual makeup looks of Maybelline. Uh, and finally, I would say that that in terms of connecting with the speed of culture in terms of leading beauty tech and digital, but also in terms of being very data-driven when we come to A&P optimization, because 32% of our net sales is A&P, and here we are bringing our proprietary ROI tools, like BET IQ bets is our beauty engagement touch points . And, and the tool is measuring ROI in the short term , but also with the great focus on long-term ROI .

David Wheldon (host) 27:17

So Asmita, you and I are gonna meet in person shortly, which I'm really looking forward to in Toronto when I'm gonna be moderating a panel about , um, the role of the CMO today. And we're positing the notion that it's almost an impossible job at the moment. It doesn't sound like it is for you, so I can imagine what you'll talk about, but can you tell us what your point of view is on that heady subject?

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 27:40

Yeah , first, I really look forward to being in Toronto with you and with all the marketeers. And it , it's going to be a very interesting discussion at the panel. Uh , to me, the job is about working with the management of the company to become future fit and when we become future fit , of course there are things within it which are difficult. Uh , but at the same time they're fascinating. Yeah. And like I said, I think I've been thinking about the subject, and one of the things that the CMO and the CDMO job is , is to perform while transform so on one hand there's a pace of transformation coming, and then you're performing. And there was a question that you asked that on one hand, we want to be agile, we want to innovate, but then we have to scale, we have to deploy. It is a very strategic job. So we have to simplify what we are saying and what bring clarity, but it cannot be too simplistic because it is about building expertise. And then one hand we have to bring expertise to the company and new expertise, data was an expertise in the company that everybody brought in. Digital transformation was an expertise. Uh, bringing technology is an expertise. On the other hand, we also have to, to integrate this expertise into the marketing teams very, very quickly so that it, it gets integrated. In all of this , it is true that this performing while transforming this dichotomy is what makes the job fascinating. Uh , because you are constantly working with both your faculties to say how to do them both right?

David Wheldon (host) 29:46

Very good. And, and also I'd like to end on what's top of your agenda and what do you think CMOs around the world should have top of their agenda at the moment?

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 29:59

I mean, top of the agenda is definitely to be future fit and within that what, what drives us all is to make choices that drive return on investment, that drive return on investment for us in the short term , but also build brand equities in the long term . So it still comes back to making that choices that, that are serving both.

David Wheldon (host) 30:32

Well, listen, no wonder that you are the global marketer of the year with results like that and growth like that , and such brilliant examples that really bring to life what you're doing. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, and I'm really looking forward to talking to you in person in Toronto very soon at the Global Marketer Week. And I hope we'll see many of you there. But again , congratulations to you and all the great people of L'Oréal for doing such a brilliant job. Thanks so much.

Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal 30:59

Thank you very much, David. See you soon.

David Wheldon (host) 31:01

Okay, everybody, look forward to seeing you all in Toronto. Take care .