Bridging the art and science of marketing — with the CMO of L'Oréal SAPMENA.

Hi, I'm Kate O'Keeffe, CEO of Heatseeker, a customer insights platform driven by AI, helping incredible brands with their customer understanding. I just spent an amazing half an hour with Lex.

Hi, so good to be with you, Kate. I'm Lex Bradshaw-Zanger, chief marketing and digital officer for the L'Oréal Group in a region called SAPMENA — forty percent of the world's population, between New Zealand and Morocco. We have about 39 global brands within the L'Oréal Group, all in beauty and personal care.

And Lex, what did you enjoy most about your chat with me today?

We're already working with you at Heatseeker, so I know what you do, and it's super exciting to talk about how you're reinventing some of the core challenges of marketing — how you're bridging art and science, de-risking creativity, and bringing the consumer to life.

So excited to be kicking off this podcast series with you. You've had such an incredible career in marketing. We're going to spend some time unpacking the role of customer love in unlocking success — for you personally, and for the incredible brands you've been a catalyst for. But let's start with how you and I met. Could you share with our listeners how you stumbled across me and Heatseeker?

I don't think anybody can stumble across you — you're a power beyond belief. In all seriousness: as part of our regional efforts in L'Oréal SAPMENA, we have an open-innovation outreach program to bring startups closer to our business, called the Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program. It's a competition that starts across all our markets, filtering from about 5,000 organizations across the region down to ten. You came to our grand finale in Singapore late last year and were one of the winners.

It was an incredible day, Lex. I felt like I knew the L'Oréal brand very well — icons in beauty and in customer understanding. But I did not appreciate until I was in that room the passion the brand has for technology and AI. It wasn't until I stepped in that I thought, we're going to win this.

You've spent time in agency, in technology with Facebook, then McDonald's, and now as CMO of SAPMENA for L'Oréal. Take me through that journey and how your love of customers has driven your success.

I wish I could say there was a strategy and a vision, but it was right time, right place — increasing your surface area for luck. I spent almost 10 years in the agency world across Paris, New York and Dubai, doing exciting things in digital: how do you bring technology to create interesting customer experiences? My first-ever job was taking brand strategy as a consulting product outside of marketing — that gave me a love of brands. Then I went to the company now called Meta, but I still want to call it Facebook. I was lucky to be there when they acquired Instagram, went through an IPO, and changed from a narrow focus to a broad-reach organization.

Then to McDonald's — I love the brand, love the products. I say the ketchup got stuck on my lips and turned into lipstick. And now I've been with L'Oréal almost 10 years across Paris, London and now Singapore, always in a Chief Digital and Marketing Officer role: a combination of digital and marketing transformation, technology, consumer centricity, e-commerce. This region is 40% of the world's population and probably less than 10% of the beauty market — massive opportunity in markets like India and Indonesia, and more mature ones like Australia.

Talk to me about your time at Facebook and performance marketing. What does it not tell us about who our customer is?

Facebook was probably the first platform to bring together data and technology around consumers in a very identity-centric way — the social graph, where everything linked back to an individual — at an enormous scale that had never been seen. That combination gave birth to mass precision, which was almost a contradiction. But the gap Heatseeker fills is the return path. Facebook unlocked the ability to target at an individual level; you're unlocking the ability to use that data and those groups of people to make data-driven, scientific decisions around creativity and innovation — to create a feedback loop on ideas and concepts.

We find that data is an incredible source of hypotheses, Lex — but hypotheses not yet at a level of statistical significance you can count on. Who knows what was going on that day, what competitors were doing, the mood the algorithm was in. It would be terrible to decide a great campaign was dead because it had a bad day on the platform. So we listen deeply across Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, and use that as hypotheses we can test live or through synthetics.

You've answered one of the biggest challenges in the agency world. Agencies are about creativity above all, and there's always a fight between the creatives and the people who have to make decisions. Great creative ideas never make it off the table because there's too much risk and no knowledge of data. You're bringing the ability to de-risk amazing creativity, to de-risk innovation — in a space that's needed it for hundreds of years.

How do we make sure we're not sending the wrong message to the wrong customer at the wrong time? So many marketing organizations are recentralizing teams, which pulls marketers further from their customers — in a world where they may not speak the language, let alone the jokes or the pop-culture heritage of their customers. How do we bring that customer understanding back into the agentic enterprise?

That's supremely true. We have 39 global brands and hundreds of millions of consumers — it's very difficult to have a conversation with each one. At McDonald's we'd say 70 million customers every day around the world, but very little ability to go to each one individually and understand what's going on.

To bring that to life: I spoke to the CMO of Australia New Zealand, Georgia Hack, who wanted me to share the story of your trip into people's bathrooms, pottering through their products. What was the most surprising thing you learned?

When I travel to markets we do what we call consumer connects — most exciting when they're in-home visits. They'll bring out their makeup bag, and if you're lucky take you into the bathroom. When they hold the product and talk about the role it plays in their lives, why they made those choices — none of that can come alive in a PowerPoint presentation. It's impossible. We need more proximity to consumers. Consumer centricity has had a lot of lip service — but how do you really make it come to life? Using real data, synthetic data, avatars — how do I bring the consumer off the PowerPoint slide, out of their bathroom, right to somebody's desk? It's research in real time, very micro, right where I need it.

One sticks out: her focus on beauty had evolved over time. She was more luxury, fragrance and makeup when younger; then as she had kids and aged, she was more about wellness — also driven by COVID, which drove a massive focus on wellness and skincare. People evolve not just by age and where they live, but by life status — married, kids, a partner. Now we can find people who are single, who have kids — not just a 17-to-35-year-old in Sydney. There's much more granularity, and so we need deeper understanding.

And especially in larger organizations, it's not enough to have the right answer. You need incredibly compelling quant data that shows, to a level of statistical significance, that overwhelmingly people are more worried about this problem than that one. In the enterprise, we've got to bring people along for the journey.

Let me tell you a McDonald's story. 70 million customers a day — and because they own the cash register, every data point you can imagine. There was a discovery of Sundaes and Nuggets: the BI data showed a correlation, and there were weak signals online of people putting nuggets on top of sundaes. It became a secret menu item — niche. If we'd had Heatseeker then, we could have said: how do we take this concept and blow it up, test it with consumers, instead of saying 'this is disgusting, we won't do it'? There was potential missed to take something small and niche and make it enormous. That's the combination of qual and quant, data and governance, ideas that are de-risked so people feel comfortable. You're bridging the art and science of marketing.

Such a great point. And if we'd asked people, 'do you dip your nuggets in your sundaes?' — plenty who did wouldn't have told us.

Probably. I did do it — but I don't think I'd claim it was a good idea.

We find the correlation between what people say they'll do and what they actually do is worlds apart. Great studies show what people say in surveys is only 20 to 30 percent correlated to what they really do. That's shocking now that we have better tools — with Heatseeker we have up to 95% correlation for real-world behaviour, and we know how correlated it is because we also run live experiments. As marketers, we've put up with 70 to 80 percent drift on reality in our decisions. Human beings don't mean to lie, but they often don't know themselves. You only have to watch couples' therapy, Lex.

Shame is a big deal — it's why people don't buy condoms at supermarkets and why it's good to buy those things online. But it's true.

Getting to the heart of real human longing and cutting through the shame — L'Oréal does a beautiful job of catering to people in these private moments, in the bathroom every morning, a ritualistic moment of self-care. Talk to me about your time at L'Oréal and how you're enjoying it as someone who loves spending time with customers.

L'Oréal's vision has always been beauty for all — there's no single representation of beauty; it's different in every market, culture and ethnicity. That's evolving with what we call beauty tech — bringing data, technology and AI into a vision of beauty for each. Depending on exactly who you are today, there's a beauty answer for you. Beauty is on the cutting edge of marketing: it's a fast-moving consumer good at an accessible price point, but also a very emotional category. You're putting these things on your skin, your hair, your face. Brand plus performance plus how it makes me feel — that makes marketing these products extremely exciting.

We can't get any closer to the consumer — they literally put your products on their face. I went shopping and picked up the La Roche-Posay Cicaplast Baume B5. What can you tell me about this cream I'm playing with today?

This brand has one of the biggest stories. La Roche-Posay is a place — a thermal spa with a pseudo-hospital on site where, hundreds of years ago, burn victims went for the magic waters. Even today burn victims are sent there by their doctor, and those suffering from cancer treatment, because the side effects of chemo are similar to the impact of burns. The brand was born there, so it has deep purpose and supports cancer charities in every country. Cicaplast is fundamentally a healing product — great for kids with scraped knees — but also an incomparable moisturizer. One of my favorite brands in the group, and skincare is on fire these days.

What a great story — the origin at the spa, and here we are in 2026, hundreds of years later, and folks are still crazy about the product. It has something of a cult following. What do you think drives a passion brand or a cult following?

A lot of things, and it's changed over time. Twenty-plus years ago beauty and fashion were driven by traditional advertising and who the brand ambassador was — ambassadors have always been important. What's changing now is the amount of other voices and the storytelling around brands. The La Roche-Posay medical spa — there are more opportunities to tell that story now: films, live streams, virtual environments. Technology has made brand storytelling even bigger. But it's also influencers, advocates, affiliates, and consumers talking. I think it's Bezos who said your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. The brand has a role, but there's an enormous piece of what everybody else is saying.

In a world of AI, how does that personal connection fit in? I've heard you talk about AI as an averaging machine. What do you think the risk is to us as marketers right now?

We're at an interesting point — difficult macroeconomics, and technology moving so fast. There's a K-shaped thing going on for marketers. At the bottom end there's an averaging, a plain vanilla — everybody has the same democratized tools, so everybody can lift their quality level. That's the AI slop, the content slop, where everybody's at a very average level. So to stand out you have to try even harder — that's the top of the K, human plus AI coming together.

People thought AI would just make us all superhuman — that even if I know nothing, AI outputs the right answer and I don't need to know anything. The reality is AI is a combination of clean, structured data points and probabilistic models and recombinations. You have to have a fundamental knowledge of your space to know what good looks like. AI has to be a tool to make you do your job better — rather than a replacement for a craft you never had. Real experience plus technology makes a difference. It's not the death of the marketer; it's how you're good at your craft and get even better with tools.

Especially in our space — customer insight has been so poorly served by the tools, because of the data input. You're either counting on historical customer data, which can't help with a new launch or concept, or you're running surveys, with their poor correlation to how people really behave. Customer understanding is being fundamentally rebuilt by the technology now available.

And customer insight is a skill — it doesn't just pop out of the data. That's why we visit people's homes. You have an instinct about something somebody says, and then you need to validate it — with them, and at scale. Consumers don't come up and tell you their specific pain point and the exact message you need. That has to be teased out. There's still a real skill in discovering and building customer insights.

It's been wonderful working with your team in the Australian market — we're helping build a synthetic audience for skincare, because we know some customers hate telling us about their needs and insecurities. It's not exactly something people volunteer.

Of course — it's not cool. Though I have some La Roche-Posay serum on this morning; you can't see it, which is why I look so good. Maybe it's the camera filter.

Let's move to the mandate. If I'm a marketer listening on my commute, a bit terrified about how fast things are changing and how short tenures are now — get in, make a splash, move on — what do you want me to do on Monday?

Two things. First: you need experts. Technology is not replacing expertise. The fundamentals of marketing — understanding your brand, your consumers, the business proposition — are super important, and they're enhanced by technology like yours. Second: the ability to de-risk, to bridge the art and science of marketing — to take an instinct into an idea, then test and create data that proves out the hypothesis. The right people and skills with the right tools, and using data and tech to de-risk super-creative ideas. Plain vanilla doesn't work anymore.

You're serving so many cultures and languages, and beauty means so many different things across that region. How are your teams thinking about that?

Our central teams are sometimes shocked by the number of cultures and expressions of beauty — but that's where technology makes a difference; it helps us be relevant in different places. We focus a lot on building capabilities — in the function, and in how we use tech. There's still a fear factor around adopting new technology, so whether it's Gemini, Claude or our own L'Oréal GPT, there's a big push to usage. You've got to get over the fear factor and understand what scaled data and technology can do, then apply it to your specific problem — without forgetting the fundamentals of what we were doing yesterday.

Build a bridge for me to the L'Oréal customer. What do you feel we owe our customers right now?

The world has changed a lot, but as humans we haven't mutated that much — certainly not at the same pace as technology. Our fundamental needs are still the same: to look good, to feel good, to be recognized, to have relationships. That's where beauty plays an important role, even if each of us has our own vision. As brands we need to understand the humanity, the emotional connection, the empowerment — and that appears differently in different places. It's not spray-and-pray, one message to all. What consumers expect has changed, but the fundamentals of emotion and of understanding brands are the same.

I remember a consumer in Australia talking about Garnier — for her it was linked to the beach, washing the sand out of your hair, probably from when she was younger. She didn't even know Garnier was a French, not Australian, brand. It was so nice to see how a brand can have such a connection with someone's life. That's what creates the stickiness.

I love that deep localization — a global brand that each of us has an individual relationship to, where it's from being less relevant than that it reminds me of the beach as a kid. Where I'd like to end is where we began: on that stage, sharing what Heatseeker could do for L'Oréal — bringing together L'Oréal's love for customers, its love for technology, and your vision for mass personalization. I feel really lucky we came together.

It's going very well — you're already in at least two, if not three, of our markets. You've hit on a sweet spot: how do we bring data-backed insights at scale right to somebody's desk, in a way that keeps the consumer alive? Bridging the art of consumer insights with the science of proof points, evidence and data at scale. I'm excited for what the future looks like as we continue to work together.

You took a big personal decision to come on board Heatseeker as an advisor — you're served by lots of brands and technology. Why did you make that decision? Because you love to share great ideas with other marketers?

I love seeing new things come to life. I have an instinctive desire for creativity and impact, and I need technology to help me do that. I found in you and your team some exciting, passionate people with a similar bridge to me — big corporate background, but a desire to bring technology and creativity together and transform marketing. Half the challenge of a new business isn't the product itself, it's convincing other people to understand it and want to buy it. So it's fun to work with you on that.

Amazing, Lex. That brings us to a close. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom — I loved our conversation about Sundaes and Nuggets; I feel like going for a snack. And thank you for your personal support and sponsorship as we roll out Heatseeker and share L'Oréal's love of great technology and its customers.

Pleasure. Let's hope we can get more marketers less scared of AI and technology, and create a super future for everybody. I have a catchphrase I always say: marketing hasn't changed, but marketers must.