Finalist 2025
Brand & Media Owner Partnership
Brand
L’Oreal Group
Entered by:
T Brand Studio, New York Times Advertising
This is Not a Beauty Podcast
The Challenge
L’Oréal Groupe, the world’s No. 1 beauty brand, reaches 1.5 billion consumers across 150+ countries through 37 global brands including Lancôme, L’Oréal Paris, Prada, YSL, and Valentino. At its core, the company is driven by a belief that beauty is essential to life – woven into culture, identity, self-expression, and societal progress.
Yet despite beauty’s global cultural and economic impact, many still dismiss it as superficial – particularly influential audiences like business leaders, policymakers, and men, who often perceive beauty as simply ‘just makeup’ or an ‘aisle of products in a store’. This narrow perception fails to recognize beauty’s deeper role in shaping culture, driving economies, and influencing human experience.
For L’Oréal Groupe, this presented both a brand and category challenge: how to reframe beauty’s significance and elevate the conversation among those least likely to engage.
To address this, L’Oréal Groupe developed the Essentiality of Beauty research study – a global body of work designed to challenge outdated perceptions and demonstrate beauty’s universal relevance.
The opportunity: spark a bold, credible conversation that challenges misconceptions, reaches influential audiences, and reframes beauty from superficial to essential.
In every aspect of modern life.
The Content Solution
Because beauty conversations are often visual and one-sided, we took a bold approach — not only in what story they told, but how we told it. We wiped the slate clean and transformed the monologue into a meaningful dialogue through an inspiring podcast and media promotion.
Introducing This is Not a Beauty Story, L’Oréal Groupe’s first-ever unified global media campaign and podcast uniting all 37 brands under one purpose – to reveal the serious role beauty plays in the topics people take seriously – like sports, science, politics, business and health.
Inspired by The New York Times’s audio journalism, L’Oréal Groupe launched This is Not a Beauty Podcast, a six-episode series exploring the hidden ways beauty shapes our world. Hosted by Oscar-nominated actress Isabella Rossellini, the show featured celebrated guests and unexpected talent to guide these nuanced conversations, using the audio medium as a safe space for open thought and discussion.
Our T Brand Studio journalists led interviews with talent across countries, timezones and languages to understand the impact beauty is having on these subjects and the far reach it has on people’s lives around the world.
For example, in our episode on Sports, Olympic gold medalist Noah Lyles, renowned for his bold style and signature painted nails, showed how confidence drives his exceptional performance. In our episode on Politics, Carl Ray, Michelle Obama’s makeup artist, explained how beauty can help voters focus on a politician’s message rather than just their appearance. And in an interview with 107-year-old tattoo artist Apo Whang-od, we heard about the significance of tattoos in societies that have held longstanding resentment towards certain cultures.
In addition to the brand podcast, which was the cornerstone of L’Oréal Groupe’s campaign with The New York TImes, T Brand Studio and New York Times advertising also helped to reshape how readers perceive beauty by building an opportunity for L’Oreal to sponsor a new body of important journalism created by the newsroom titled ‘Face Value.’ This editorial series was updated on a regular basis with relevant and important articles, which expanded beauty coverage for New York Times readers. Within this newsroom series, across relevant sections of The New York Times and on social media, we created digitally native ad units to promote our podcast. These ads also challenged traditional perceptions of beauty by highlighting its role in topics such as sports, science, politics, business, and health.
The Media/Content Amplification Solution
As an integrated 360° campaign, we harnessed the full power of The New York Times — across audio, online, social media, and print — to push the beauty conversation beyond traditional boundaries.
Audio:
Our original branded podcast, This Is Not a Beauty Podcast, was distributed on major platforms, including Apple, Google, and Spotify, as well as via a podcast player on Nytimes.com.
To drive listenership and build a loyal audience, we promoted the podcast with individually recorded 30 second audio spots and ran them in top New York Times podcasts, such as The Daily, Modern Love, The Interview, and Hard Fork. Knowing that 80% of podcast listeners discover new shows through podcasts they already follow, we prioritized in-audio promotion to maximize reach and engagement.
Online:
With L’Oreal Groupe’s sponsorship, the newsroom launched a new journalism series titled, Face Value, expanding beauty coverage within The New York Times. The client maintained exclusive rights to advertise adjacent to the content and used the opportunity to reorient readers in how to perceive beauty and encourage them to take it seriously.
The online campaign redirected curious audiences to the Essentiality of Beauty study on L’Oreal Groupe’s website and built anticipation for the podcast launch within digital display ads (Flex XL and Flex Frames), native drivers, and social posts — ensuring beauty was top of mind when the podcast debuted. Using NYT’s proprietary and innovative 1st party targeting techniques we were also able to hyper target the campaign to our exact audiences, including business leaders, policy makers and men.
Print:
To create an unmissable moment at readers’ doorsteps, we utilized the high-impact channel of print to encourage readers to listen to the podcast. We integrated a QR code directing readers to Apple and Spotify —seamlessly connecting print to audio discovery. This print campaign ran globally to complement the digital and audio promotion to ensure that L’Oreal Groupe didn’t miss out on an opportunity to reach audiences that have traditionally read The New York Times newspaper.
The Result
As Matthew DiGirolamo, Chief Corporate Affairs & Engagement Officer North America, L’Oréal Groupe, put it: “The expressions, rituals and aspirations of people around the globe are a powerful force shaping culture, society and industry. This campaign with The New York Times revealed beauty’s essential role — often hidden in plain sight.”
The campaign set out to: raise awareness, engage new audiences, and shift perceptions of beauty for L’Oréal Groupe. The results delivered on all fronts.
We reached over 42 million people — the equivalent of more than 60% of France or two-thirds of the UK. Our podcast, This Is Not a Beauty Podcast, reached #1 in Personal Journals, broke into the U.S. top 100 during launch week, and ranked in the top 1% of all global podcasts.
In total, listeners spent 13,700+ hours (1.6 years) engaging with beauty’s serious role in the world. 20% of listeners were male — a fourfold increase from the 5% who initially expressed interest in beauty. C-Suite targeting drove CTRs 80% above industry benchmarks, while 70%+ episode completion rates exceeded averages by 30%.
We built future momentum with 12,000+ new podcast subscribers. According to our Kantar study, message recall rose +18%, creative leadership perception grew +10%, and alignment with L’Oréal Groupe’s purpose increased +11%.
Beyond metrics, the campaign sparked meaningful conversation. As one listener shared: “It makes me consider the word ‘beauty’ in a new light.”
This campaign didn’t just drive numbers; it drove new conversations, sparked new ways of thinking, and cemented L’Oréal Groupe’s position as a creative leader, redefining the role of beauty in people’s lives.