An ebullient 21-year-old French video blogger may not appear to be an obvious antidote to advertisers’ fears about the rise of ad-blocking software, but partnering with Enjoyphoenix has proved highly effective for L’Oréal.
The cosmetics company and global advertising heavyweight is working with a growing number of online “influencers”, including the French YouTube star and make-up reviewer as a way of varying its online offering — but also to circumvent ad-blocking apps.
“This is really about creating greater content and experiences, greater formats for our consumers — especially in an age where ad-blocking is going mainstream,” Lubomira Rochet, L’Oréal’s chief digital officer, told the Financial Times.
“The whole thing that ad-blocking is pointing to is classical advertising fatigue,” she said. “We need to reinvent the experience and we need to make it less interruptive, more immersive, more rewarding, more personalised.”
The rise of ad-blocking apps has caused turmoil in advertising, throwing into question the effectiveness of “traditional” online methods for reaching customers, such as banners and video adverts on websites.
Pagefair, which helps advertisers get around blockers, estimated last month that more than 200m people now use some form of ad-blocking software on their laptop or desktop computers, as do more than 419m — about 22 per cent — of the world’s 1.8bn smartphone users.
To deal with that problem, L’Oréal has struck deals with homegrown stars on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and other internet sites. Getting video bloggers to talk about and review its products helps the company avoid paying for banners and videos, which are prone to being removed from viewers’ screens by ad-blocking software.
Some of the arrangements are financial, which L’Oréal says it always discloses. For example, it is working with five YouTube vloggers in the Middle East with a combined subscriber base exceeding 22m.
Other deals go further, such as in the case of Enjoyphoenix, who now appears weekly on L’Oréal’s Maybelline YouTube channel. She has made 66 episodes to date using L’Oréal’s production facilities. Enjoyphoenix has nearly 2.5m subscribers on her main YouTube channel.
“This is really a reinvention of marketing models in an age of ad-blocking and an age of selfies and influencers,” said Ms Rochet. “That is a huge shift.”
Striking arrangements with online reviewers and other popular vloggers can deliver potent results that go beyond circumventing ad blockers. When Zoella, the UK-based vlogger, did a spontaneous and unpaid review of the latest offering from L’Oréal’s The Body Shop brand, sales of the product doubled during the following four weeks.
L’Oréal last year spent €7.4bn, or 29.1 per cent of sales, on advertising and promotion, according to company accounts. The company said digital accounted for 25.5 per cent of net media spending.
Ms Rochet said so-called “earned media”, such as working with online influencers, was growing as a proportion of the company’s media mix spending. “We are changing the way we craft our advertising,” she said. “And we are absolutely also working with influencers.”