L'Oréal uses a creative AI startup to reach men it was ignoring

L'Oréal realised earlier this year it was leaving money on the table by excluding men from most campaign targeting, so it ran a men-focused test on its CeraVe skincare line in Australia and New Zealand with the help of Springboards, an Australian creative AI startup. Springboards' model, Flint, deliberately raises "temperature" on critical tokens so it produces less derivative outputs than the major LLMs. Springboards co-founder Pip Bingemann told AdExchanger that asking ChatGPT or Gemini for a running-shoe tagline reliably surfaces "Run Your Way" or "Run Your World," while his own model returns a different slogan each prompt. The point for the brand, AdExchanger reports, is using AI as a brainstorming sounding board for audiences and creative angles that a brand team would not have generated on its own, with local market insight baked in.

The crux

The practical use of AI inside brand marketing is shifting from production efficiency to idea generation, where differentiation of the model's outputs, not scale, is the selling point.

Sell-side read

A brand willing to spend to reach a segment it had simply not targeted before is net-new demand, and publishers with clearly demographically segmented audiences can position inventory against that exact offline-behaviour insight.

Watch

whether the CeraVe men's campaign performance data is released and whether more brands adopt "high-temperature" creative AI models for audience expansion.