L’oreal Failed Ad Campaign Redesign

Communication Design 1

Spring 2023

Prof: Hoda Ramy

The Original Ad

On Jan 24th 2023, tiktok influencer Mikayla Nogueira, who currently has over 14 million followers, promoted the newest mascara launch from L’oreal known as the Telescopic Lift Mascara. In the video, she is seen to be applying two coats of the mascara and then reappears at the end with false eyelashes applied. The video has over 55 million views and over 75K comments. 

The comments section of the video is filled with viewers and consumers calling out Mikayla on the false advertising. Subsequently, many other influencers responded to the “mascaragate” scandal by reviewing the mascara on themselves.

About L’oreal

L’oreal is the world’s largest and most prominent beauty and skincare brand established in 1909. It is a parent company to many other beauty brands such as Garnier, Essie, and Lancome. They sell everything from foundations to haircare to face washes. New launches in the beauty industry are released daily and with them are numerous marketing campaigns. L’oreal’s marketing and ad campaigns have historically targeted young women using messaging about self worth, inclusivity, and confidence. In 2021, L’oreal spent 10.59 billion euros on advertising and promotions.

Influencer Marketing

• Influencer Marketing Industry is set to grow to approximately $21.1 Billion in 2023
• TikTok (utilized by 56% of brands using influencer marketing) is now the most popular influencer marketing channel, jumping ahead of Instagram (51%) for the first time, and well ahead of Facebook (42%) and YouTube (38%).
• It is now the norm to pay influencers (42%), rather than just give them a free product (30%)

Source: https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-benchmark-report/

The Aftermath

There’s a saying that all publicity is good publicity and inadvertently L’oreal received much more hype around this product than anticipated. Ardell Beauty, a popular false eyelash company, responded to the scandal to promote their own product with their own version of a popular meme.

Creative Process

I started this project analyzing the color palette, copywriting, and general aesthetic of the previous ad campaigns surrounding the L’oreal Mascara. I also spent some time researching beauty ad campaigns and created some initial sketches on paper. My main idea for this campaign was to showcase the actual product and not have false advertising. Through the feedback I received from the professor, I narrowed down the sketches to digitize and focused on a video game “level up” theme.

All the posters included a video game user interface, the same color palette, and my own photos of the product in action. The typography is consistent through each iteration. One poster I decided to make into a gif and animate the loading bar and the hearts.  I also decided to make a horizontal format for one of my posters and I feel it came off even more as a desktop ui.

Discovery

Concept Development

Design Development

Final Deliverables