L’Oreal’s Bold Look Pays Off
L'Oreal
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We don’t often feature fragrance and cosmetic ads in Ad Of The Week, and there’s a simple reason for that. On the Test Your Ad platform, their average Star Rating is a low 1.9-Stars, with over half the ads in the category landing one star. To be brutal about it, most fragrance ads stink.
Does that seem too mean? Let’s call it a tribute to L’Oreal’s newest ad, a catty, entertaining tie-in with The Devil Wears Prada 2 which breaks both the fragrance category conventions and the sector’s effectiveness jinx.
Brand ambassador Kendall Jenner shows up at the L’Oreal offices to be met with an eye-rolling assistant who doesn’t recognise her, assuming she’s here for a job interview and offering some withering make-up advice. The last few candidates got fired, he says, before he joins them when his faux pas is revealed.
It’s an ad that reflects The Devil Wears Prada’s horrible but hilarious world of high fashion, with a little hint of the bitching and backbiting we can expect from the sequel. What’s more important for our purposes is that the film connection has given L’Oreal a chance to be funny, and they’ve grabbed it with both hands. A cosmetics ad with jokes? That really is a new look.
The results on Test Your Ad are nothing short of spectacular. L’Oreal’s ad scores 4.0-Stars, which puts it in the top 3 fragrance and cosmetic ads we’ve ever tested. It also hits an Exceptional rating on both short-term Spike Rating and on Brand Fluency (rapid and accurate recognition). On all three metrics L’Oreal smash the category average, with an ad built for immediate sales boosts and long-term business impact.
L’Oreal get this result by including a secret ingredient that’s one of the most effective – but hard to use – treatments in the creative salon: schadenfreude. Entertaining people by showing them others’ misfortune is proven to be one of the most effective types of happiness, if you can get it right. But it’s easy to overdo it and flip audiences into a negative response.
L’Oreal deliver a double dose of schadenfreude here. It’s no secret that the Kardashian clan aren’t everybody’s favourites, so seeing Kendall Jenner on the wrong side of the celebrity equation is refreshing. But when the tables turn, we’re also happy to see her snobby interrogator get his come-uppance. Look at the moment-by-moment Trace on the Test Your Ad report and you’ll see a bit of negative response but it’s outweighed by audience Happiness.
It’s a risky approach, but it shakes up the category conventions and the risk pays off with some terrific results. If more cosmetics and fragrance commercials opted to entertain, the category wouldn’t have an overall effectiveness problem. As it stands, L’Oreal’s ad is the season’s boldest look.
