Beauty giants L&#x27;Oréal have built a new framework to quantify the impact of creators on marketing effectiveness. L&#x27;Oréal&#x27;s Vas Kourakis and Meta&#x27;s Maria Pavlova join WARC&#x27;s Anna Hamill to discuss how the measurement framework came together, essential best practices, and what marketers can learn from their experience.

How L'Oréal thinks about creator ROI

The WARC Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** The WARC Podcast

## Participants

- **Anna Hamill** (WARC)
- **Vas Karakis** (L'Oreal)
- **Maria Pavlova** (Meta)
- **Vas Karakis** (L'Oreal)
- **Maria Pavlova** (Meta)

## Transcript

Welcome back to The WARC Podcast. I'm Anna Hamill, Senior Editor at WARC. As creators and influencers attract huge amounts of advertising investment, more brands are building measurement frameworks to ensure transparency and long-term business impact. For the beauty industry, a strong creator program is increasingly table stakes for connecting with potential shoppers both in the algorithm and beyond.

L'Oreal has built a creative measurement program to supercharge its effectiveness across these channels, working with its partner Meta to develop new best practices. And now, they've shared that playbook on WARC.com where it's available to WARC subscribers right now. Today, L'Oreal and Meta are joining us to share insights on how this work came together and what marketers can learn from it.

Joining me now are Vas Karakis, Global Marketing Effectiveness Director at L'Oreal and Maria Pavlova, Marketing Science Manager at Meta. Vas, Maria, welcome to The WARC Podcast. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, Anna. It's exciting to talk about this particular case study because L'Oreal has learned so much from the process and I think that these lessons can be really valuable to our listeners. The report highlights a massive gap.

So, while over 60% of brands plan to use influencers, 44% of marketers admit to running campaigns without KPIs and just 38% measure ROI. Given how many billions are pouring into creator and influencer channels, these numbers are somewhat alarming. Vas, why do you think the industry has struggled so much to move beyond creator metrics like reach and engagement toward measuring harder metrics and business impact? Hmm, that's a great question to start with.

So, look, creator marketing is genuinely one of the most exciting spaces in our industry right now. And, you know, as the paper highlighted, 72% of the brands are planning to increase their influencer budgets. And nearly 9 out of 10 are open to brand-sponsored creator content. So, the reality is, as we just mentioned, and our report puts it quite plainly, is that 44% of the marketeers are still running campaigns without any KPIs.

And only 38-40% are measuring the ROI. That's not because people don't want to do it better, but because I think doing it properly, connecting all the creator investments all the way to the different hard business outcomes like sales uplift, brand equity, and real ROI is actually quite a sophisticated piece of work. It requires clean, structured data at a level that most organizations haven't really yet built for creator channels.

And it requires actually a measurement infrastructure that can hold creator content to the same standards like we do with other media touchpoints. So, honestly, it requires also senior buy-in and dedicated...

How L'Oréal thinks about creator ROI

Transcript

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How L'Oréal thinks about creator ROI

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.