How L’Oréal Uses First-Party Data to Power Personalisation and Media Efficiency

Overview

As the world’s leading beauty company, L’Oréal operates 36 brands across 150+ countries. In the diverse and rapidly evolving APAC region, the L’Oréal SAPMENA (South Asia Pacific, Middle East, and North Africa) team embarked on a mission to modernise its marketing infrastructure, enabling real-time personalisation, smarter media investments, and privacy-first experiences.

Partnering with Tealium, L’Oréal built a customer data foundation that could adapt to local markets, accelerate execution, and empower teams to innovate with agility.

The Challenge

SAPMENA is one of L’Oréal’s most complex regions, spanning 15 markets with different levels of digital maturity, customer behaviour, and regulatory environments. The team faced several challenges:

• Disconnected data sources across markets, brands, and platforms
  
• Lack of a unified customer view for segmentation and activation
  
• Long campaign lead times due to technical dependencies
  
• Limited agility to personalise at scale
  
• Growing demand for privacy-first data practices across all regions

Despite already having a CDP in place, the team realised they needed to go further, to unify customer data across touch points, automate manual processes, and reduce reliance on engineering resources.

The Solution

With Tealium, L’Oréal implemented a modular and scalable real-time customer data infrastructure. The team rolled out Tealium’s Customer Data Platform across 15 markets, enabling:

• A single customer view across commerce, CRM, loyalty, and media
  
• Real-time enrichment and activation across Meta, Google, Adobe, Salesforce, and more
  
• Self-serve campaign capabilities for marketers, reducing engineering bottlenecks
  
• Localised consent and governance controls to meet country-specific regulations
  
• A test-and-learn framework that allows markets to build, validate, and scale faster

Key Outcomes:

• Unified Customer Data Across 15 Markets
  Built a real-time customer data pipeline that connects online and offline data across 36 brands and 15 countries, enabling smarter segmentation and activation.

• From Weeks to Days: Greater Speed to Market
  What once required significant lead time and technical support can now be executed quickly and independently by marketers—allowing faster testing and scaling of personalisation use cases.
• Boosted Media Performance with First-Party Data
  Using Tealium-powered first-party data and Meta’s CAPI, L’Oréal achieved:
  • 50% lower Cost per Lead
  • 78% lower Cost per Click
  • 42% higher Return on Ad Spend (vs. 2024 average)*

          A clear win in driving more efficient, high-performing paid media campaigns.

• Improved Cost Efficiency
  By empowering marketers to self-serve, L’Oréal reduced reliance on engineering, lowering operational costs per campaign and improving speed-to-value.

• Future-Proofed Privacy & Consent
  Designed a privacy-first architecture that aligns with regional data laws, giving consumers better control and improving brand trust.
• Higher Conversion from Real-Time Personalisation
  Kiehl’s used real-time personalisation on its website to drive stronger engagement and sales:
  • Loyalty Member Campaign:
    Highlighted personalised loyalty point offers on product pages for “Extra” tier members, encouraging conversion.
    Results: +13.5% purchases/user, +30% revenue/user over 95 days**.
  • Men’s Range Campaign:
    Promoted men’s skincare products to male users with past interest in the category, using targeted banners and messaging.
    Results: +37% CTR, +4.5% purchases/user over 35 days***.

“Tealium helped us go from data chaos to clarity, where we can finally see, understand, and activate customer data in real time. What used to take weeks now takes hours, and our marketers can build locally, test quickly, and scale what works across 15 markets. This isn’t just about tools, it’s about empowering every brand and market to deliver personalised beauty experiences with agility and trust.”

Carla Piccione
CRM Major Programs Manager, L’Oréal

What’s Next?

L’Oréal is now expanding its data activation to support loyalty programs, AI-powered product recommendations, and offline-to-online journey tracking, ensuring the brand remains a leader in beauty innovation across digital and physical touch points.

To hear more about L’Oréal’s journey, watch their Digital Velocity keynote session here

* Results were from the 2024 Meta CAPI Campaign, showcasing multiple brands and audience segments.
**Campaign ran on 2,000+ users.
***Campaign ran on over 12,600+ users.