Lancôme brings offline brand online with programmatic advertising

As a luxury skincare brand, Lancôme frequently hosts physical interactive events to engage their consumers and raise awareness of its iconic skincare products. With COVID-19 hitting the market hard in 2020, and government restrictions in place around crowd control in event spaces, Lancôme decided to launch its first-ever virtual flagship event, the Advanced Génifique Virtual Flagship, to engage consumers online.

With a plethora of virtual events popping up as COVID-19 drove more brands to divert their investments and activities online, Lancôme had to cut through the noise and drive awareness of this novel flagship store. Their goal was to drive the desired audience to the website and have them engage with site content through sample sign-ups, in-site viewing of celebrity live streams, and online purchases.

As a trusted partner, Quantcast was appointed the lead programmatic solution for this campaign to drive awareness of this virtual event and traffic to the event website. The newly-created microsite that the flagship event was hosted on did not have pre-existing site traffic, and so it was imperative that Quantcast first build awareness (and anticipation) around the launch of the event in a pre-launch phase. Quantcast achieved this goal through a dual-pronged strategy: connecting with new users interested in beauty and skincare products and retargeting existing Lancôme brand site visitors.

Despite the challenges in launching what is traditionally an offline brand online, the Quantcast-Lancôme campaign drove outstanding results with a 6.2% uplift in brand and product awareness, especially considering market conditions and intense competition from competing beauty brands that were aggressively advertising during the same campaign period. Lancôme successfully built affinity with the right audiences and saw a phenomenal engagement rate of 11.3% with ad creative rich media executions. They achieved over 9,600 visits to the virtual event at a cost-effective cost-per-visit that was 21% below Lancôme’s goal.