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.
Earlier this year, in order to more effectively reach a male audience, L’Oréal decided to develop a campaign specifically aimed toward men for its CeraVe skin care products in Australia and New Zealand.
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 brand’s South Asian, Middle Eastern and North African region, 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 (powered by its 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.”
Dial it up
Springboards determined that the most effective way to generate unique outputs is to dial up the entropy, or the range of plausible next tokens, on its AI model.
The model identifies what Springboards refers to as “critical tokens,” or the tokens that have the greatest potential effect on the end result, and then raises the entropy 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 increase variation. It’s important to maintain predictability for linguistic coherence, and it’s crucial that the core idea of the final output is unique, rather than just individual words or phrases, 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.”
