L’Oréal Launches Italy’s First Cookieless PAIR Campaign with LiveRamp

The Challenge

L’Oréal, the world leader in beauty, has offered innovative and diverse beauty products and services to women and men for more than a century. To keep up with fast-changing consumer preferences, L’Oréal needed a dynamic marketing data strategy that showed a clear view of customers across channels, publishers, and platforms.

Historically, marketers have relied on cookie-based tracking and third-party signals to learn more about customer trends and needs. Today, while these signals help, there are more sophisticated solutions to reconcile and activate a brand’s first-party data across channels in a trustworthy way.  

With 50% of the internet already cookieless and rising by the day, the beauty brand knew they needed a data solution and partner that could safely connect shopper data to deliver engaging, personalised advertising everywhere customers spend time.

L’Oréal Italia set out to create a cookieless advertising strategy – which didn’t exist yet in Italy. In collaboration with GroupM, Google, LiveRamp, and publishers including Italia Online, Piemme, and CairoRCS, L’Oréal Italia launched the country’s first PAIR campaign, leading the way in cookieless advertising.

The Solution

By leveraging LiveRamp’s authentication solution with Google Display & Video 360’s PAIR, L’Oréal Italia successfully activated a programmatic campaign without third-party signals. PAIR gives publishers and advertisers the ability to securely reconcile first-party data for audiences who have interacted with both the brand and the publisher’s website. The process ensures no user-level data is shared between them, and the aggregated data is only meaningful in the context of their direct relationship.

Advertiser-publisher match rates, a vital indicator of the PAIR footprint in Italy, have doubled since April 2024. The evident growth in PAIR adoption by Italian publishers was a critical, decisive element for L’Oréal Italia to choose PAIR in their leap to cookieless advertising.

With PAIR, L’Oréal Italia activated its first-party data to reach and target audiences on the open web without cookies. The campaign not only aligned with data ethics standards, but it helped the team create a sophisticated marketing strategy that’s ready for whatever changes the future brings in shopper data.

L’Oréal Italia achieved this first-time accomplishment through close collaboration with GroupM to implement the PAIR protocol in partnership with Google, LiveRamp, and publisher partners. The result was a tailored campaign that customers and brands could trust.

The Results

The team quickly saw positive results. The campaign achieved millions of impressions without third-party signals. Through mid-flight optimisation, the team was able to make the most of their ad spend, maximising the efficiency and impact of their investments. The fast success of the campaign proved the effectiveness of PAIR in delivering scalable, trustworthy advertising for high business impact.

Buoyed by the impressive results, L’Oréal Italia and GroupM are planning to expand the use of PAIR for cookieless audience-based marketing in upcoming campaigns. L’Oréal will continue to pursue innovative marketing solutions as they deliver the best of beauty with quality, efficacy, safety, and responsibility to customers everywhere.