AI Is Helping L’Oréal Brainstorm Unique Ways To Reach Male Audiences | AdExchanger

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Home Marketers AI Is Helping L’Oréal Brainstorm Unique Ways To Reach Male Audiences

Marketers
AI Is Helping L’Oréal Brainstorm Unique Ways To Reach Male Audiences By
Joanna Gerber

Tuesday, September 8th, 2026 – 1:00 am
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Anyone who thinks that men don’t care about beauty products (a) is probably stuck in the 20th century and (b) should take a good look at Andrew Garfield.
A lot of personal care brands, though, mainly focus their advertising on their female audiences.
But earlier this year, L’Oréal realized it was missing out on potential customers by not including men in most of its campaign targeting. So it decided to develop a campaign specifically aimed toward men. It tested this new approach on a campaign for its CeraVe skin care products in Australia and New Zealand.
But because the CeraVe brand hadn’t previously tailored its advertising to men in this part of the world, L’Oréal needed some help brainstorming creative ideas and audiences that could drive performance. And, as is the case with so many brands these days, L’Oréal turned to AI as a sounding board for its new campaign strategy.
L’Oréal collaborated with Springboards, a creative AI startup based in Australia, to develop its new campaign, which launched earlier this week. In addition to bringing local insights from the target geo to L’Oréal’s brainstorming sessions, Springboards gave the brand a data-based foundation for its creative experimentation.
It all started with a big bang
L’Oréal first became aware of Springboards in 2025, when the beauty brand launched its Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program for the first time in Australia and New Zealand. The program, which originated in the US, is an innovation competition for tech platforms to showcase unique approaches to business problems.
The inaugural Australia and New Zealand program drew over 45 applicants, and Springboards made it to the final three.
Although it didn’t win the overall competition, L’Oréal still decided to deploy Springboards’ proprietary AI model, Flint, within the company, compelled by its ability to speed up the ideation process and develop a jumping-off point (a springboard, even?) for creative ideas.
Flint has a “not like other girls” sort of vibe to it. Which is to say, it takes pride in not generating the same AI outputs as the big players.
If you ask one of the major LLMs, like ChatGPT or Gemini, to produce a tagline for running shoes, “Run Your Way” or “Run Your World” surface almost constantly, Pip Bingemann, co-founder of Springboards, told AdExchanger.
Springboards’ model, on the other hand, will give you a different slogan every time. During a demo for AdExchanger, it came up with a different option each time it was prompted, including “Pave your own path,” “Keep on running” and “Slay the day, one step at a time.”
Turning up the heat
Springboards determined that the most effective way to generate unique outputs is to dial up the temperature on its AI model – and no, that doesn’t mean literally heating up the machine.
Temperature, in the context of LLMs, refers to the likelihood of selecting a given token. Lower temperatures, which are standard among most LLMs, generate the token with the highest probability (a common approach for predictive text algorithms). Meanwhile, higher temperatures generate tokens with lower probabilities, which tend to produce less derivative outputs.
Springboards identifies what it refers to as “critical tokens,” or the tokens that have the greatest potential effect on the end result, and then dials up the temperature on those.
These critical tokens usually appear at the point in a sentence “when there should be an open-ended explosion of options,” said Bingemann.
It’s a tricky balancing act determining the best point in the ideation process to raise the model’s temperature. Dialing up the temp on the entire model often gives variation to the individual words and phrasing, but not the core message of the final output, Bingemann added.
But, when done effectively, he said, the result is unusual creative outcomes, rather than the most likely outcome based on a predictive model.
The variability of Springboards’ outputs appealed to L’Oréal, said Georgia Hack, chief digital and marketing officer for L’Oréal in the Australia-New Zealand region.
L’Oréal was also impressed by the amount of its brand DNA that Springboards ingested to ensure that the outputs were accurate and brand-relevant. L’Oréal fed the model with consumer insights (compiled from panels and Nielsen data), along with brand guidelines and product information from the CeraVe website.
But rather than let the AI dictate the final ad creative, L’Oréal uses Springboards more as a brainstorming tool, Hack said. The marketing team types in a prompt based on the campaign brief, similar to how one would engage with any other chatbot. Then, Springboards churns out a tagline, which the team discusses and uses to refine the prompt. The marketing team repeats this process until they settle on a final tagline for the campaign.
Down to the wire
For the Australia and New Zealand CeraVe campaign targeting male audiences, L’Oréal centered on social media. Its main marketing goals, Hack said, were to “stop the scroll” (i.e., catch someone’s eye with a striking enough ad to pause their doomscrolling). It also wanted to develop localized creative for the target geos.
When L’Oréal adopted Springboards, it was on a tight timeline, looking to develop a campaign in a matter of weeks rather than months.
Over the span of two weeks, L’Oréal generated 40 unique campaign ideas through the platform with an emphasis on localization and getting male audiences interested in its CeraVe products.
And what do male audiences like? According to Springboards, sports.
The campaign launch aligned with the playoffs for Australia’s national football and rugby leagues, so Springboards encouraged L’Oréal to target men by zeroing in on sports-focused content.
L’Oréal’s marketing team participated in collaborative sessions with Springboards, in which L’Oréal’s team would provide live feedback.
Some of the taglines generated during these sessions included “Your skin’s only bodyguard,” “The ceramide squad” and “It’s skin barrier season.”
The final tagline, “CeraVe, Your Skin Barrier’s MVP,” evolved from the content initially generated by Springboards after market analysis and revision by L’Oréal’s own team.
The collaborative, ongoing ideation process is the part of Springboards that “matters most” to L’Oréal, Hack said. The ability to develop more creative variation, particularly across different audiences, she added, is “an incredible tool.”

Tagged in:

AI

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AI Creative

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beauty brands

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CeraVe

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creative variants

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geo-targeting

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Georgia Hack

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L'Oreal

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Pip Bingemann

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Springboards

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L’Oréal sought to develop unique strategies for reaching male audiences, recognizing that its personal care advertising often focused predominantly on female consumers. To address this gap, the brand tested a new approach by targeting men with its CeraVe skincare products in Australia and New Zealand. Because the brand lacked prior experience tailoring advertising for this demographic in these regions, L’Oréal required external assistance to brainstorm creative concepts and target audiences, leading them to collaborate with Springboards, a creative AI startup based in Australia. This collaboration involved leveraging AI to establish a data-based foundation for their campaign development.

L’Oréal became aware of Springboards during the launch of its Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program in Australia and New Zealand, which provided exposure to Springboards’ proprietary AI model, Flint, which L’Oréal decided to deploy to accelerate its ideation process. While the program did not award Springboards the overall competition, L’Oréal utilized Flint's capability for creative experimentation. Unlike major large language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini, which tend to produce highly predictable outputs for tasks like generating taglines, Springboards’ model was designed to generate varied results; for instance, it provided different slogan options when prompted repeatedly.

The flexibility of the AI was achieved by adjusting the model's temperature setting. Temperature in large language models refers to the likelihood of selecting a specific token. While lower temperatures yield outputs with the highest probability, standard in predictive text algorithms, higher temperatures encourage the generation of tokens with lower probabilities, which results in less derivative and more creative outputs. Springboards focused on identifying "critical tokens"—those elements that have the greatest potential impact on the final result—and adjusted the temperature specifically on these tokens to encourage a range of options during ideation. This process allowed for unusual creative outcomes rather than simply the most statistically likely response based on predictive modeling.

To ensure relevance, L’Oréal fed the AI model extensive brand context, including consumer insights derived from panels and Nielsen data, along with official brand guidelines and product information from the CeraVe website. Critically, L’Oréal did not allow the AI to dictate the final creative direction; instead, they used Springboards as a sophisticated brainstorming tool. The marketing team initiated prompts based on campaign briefs, subsequently discussed the generated taglines, and iteratively refined the prompts until a final concept was settled upon.

For the Australia and New Zealand CeraVe campaign targeting men, L’Oréal focused its social media strategy on capturing attention swiftly, aiming to "stop the scroll" with striking advertisements while ensuring localization for the target geos. By utilizing Springboards over a two-week period, L’Oréal generated forty unique campaign ideas emphasizing localization and engaging male audiences. The AI encouraged a focus on sports, aligning the campaign launch with the playoffs of Australia’s national football and rugby leagues. Collaborative sessions between the L’Oréal team and Springboards allowed for live feedback throughout the process. Among the generated concepts, taglines such as “Your skin’s only bodyguard” were explored before ultimately settling on the final version, “CeraVe, Your Skin Barrier’s MVP,” following revisions by the L’Oréal marketing team. The sustained, collaborative nature of this ideation process was identified by Georgia Hack, chief digital and marketing officer for L’Oréal in the region, as the most valuable aspect, emphasizing its power to develop creative variation across different audience segments.