When Beauty meets MarTech - L'OREAL and Tencent to Unleash Marketing Innovations

SHANGHAI, Sept. 22, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Early this month, L'OREAL and Tencent renewed the JBP agreement at an event themed "Inspire Beauty with MarTech". The two sides also announced the launch of the Brand Data Center. Senior executives from both companies attended the meeting, including L'OREAL China CEO Stephane Rinderknech and Tencent COO Mark Ren.

As the world leader in beauty, L'OREAL Group is making active strides to keep up with the times and explore new ways of digital marketing. As early as 2011, the company began its cooperation with Tencent, a Chinese internet leader. The two sides started their cooperation to explore digital marketing under the Joint Business Partnership (JBP) agreement since 2013.

"L'OREAL was one of the first digital advertisers in the global beauty industry," said Mr. Stephane Rinderknech. "We believe the partnership with Tencent will help L'OREAL make a difference in China, and through Tencent's support to achieve our global vision, which is to become a 100% digital brand, build a 50% consumer relationship via new media and achieve 20% revenue by ecommerce."

Sophia Ong, GM, Strategic Partnership & KA, Online Media Group, Tencent, noted that in the Tencent MIND Conference which recently concluded, Tencent put forward "ONE Tencent", a systematic portfolio of marketing solutions by aligning all of Tencent's marketing platforms and building an inclusive ecosystem to benefit all involved. "Tencent provide L'OREAL customized marketing solutions during the three year's JBP cooperation. This time we will take the partnership as an important step to implement ONE Tencent, to bring the advertisers from the beauty industry more possibilities and use the potential of marketing."

Using its complete set of platforms and powerful data technology, Brand Data Center is tailor-made for L'OREAL by Tencent via MarTech, an emerging trend in the industry. On the basis of precision reach through Tencent's Data Management Platform, L'OREAL aims to broaden its use of data by capitalizing on Tencent's ability in social and big data, and empower its marketing through the Brand Data Center in order to achieve three goals: better precision, better efficiency and better traceability.

Specifically, the Brand Data Center will help L'OREAL realize better conversions, from increasing target audience density to collecting more sales from potential markets. Historic data analysis and algorithms will be adopted for simulation and result verification, quickly and effectively identifying target audiences and most suitable resources in order to improve marketing efficiency. Better traceability means real-time re-targeting based on data feedback during advertising in order to optimize target audience advertising materials.

Alongside the Brand Data Center, Tencent has launched an integrated data marketing tool called Inter-Trace. As one of the innovative ONE Tencent solutions, Inter-Trace combines Tencent's strengths in content, data and technology and aligns creation, communication and conversion to provide whole-course, all-dimensional data support to advertisers and customized brand marketing solutions for clients from various industries.

Through exploration of digital marketing, L'OREAL is leading the industry with its vision and practice in digital marketing. "By focusing on the digital side, advertisers all want to figure out how to carry out brand building in a fair and transparent environment," said Michael Zhang, Media Director, L'OREAL China. "In previous cooperation between L'OREAL and Tencent, a firm rejection of traffic fraud has been an essential component. Through our joint efforts, we hope to pave a way for positive development of brands, making data more credible, collaboration more transparent, and the environment fairer."

With the rise of Internet + Cosmetics, L'OREAL and Tencent, two leaders in their respective industries, are at the forefront of technology and data development in China, bringing more possibilities and igniting more types of technology-empowered cosmetics marketing.