AI/AR Makeup

AI and Advertising [2025]: How, What to Do & Experts Talk

Apr 16, 2025 · 3 minutes read

AI and Advertising [2025]: How, What to Do & Experts Talk

Artificial intelligence isn’t just transforming the way we work — it’s changing how we sell. From hyper-targeted ad campaigns to virtual lipstick try-ons that convert in a click, the beauty industry is rewriting the rules of digital advertising. If you’re in marketing and not using AI, you’re already behind.

The Smart Marketer’s Playbook: Digital Marketing with AI

Old-school digital ads? Static. New-school AI ads? Dynamic, data-driven, and customer-obsessed.

Here’s how AI in digital marketing is redefining performance:

Real-time personalization: AI engines analyze everything from skin tone to shopping habits.
Smarter targeting: With synthetic data and behavior modeling, campaigns hit the bullseye.
Better outcomes: AI doesn’t just guess what works — it learns and adapts.

Brands using AI and digital marketing are seeing fewer bounces and more buyers. The math is simple: better data + better decisions = higher ROI.

AI + AR: When Ads Become Experiences

Imagine trying on lipstick straight from a banner ad. That’s not fantasy — that’s AI-powered AR advertising in action.

At the 2023 Global Beauty & Fashion Tech Forum, industry leaders explained how AI for marketing is fueling creativity, personalization, and performance. Brands aren't just serving ads. They're serving experiences — and customers are clicking.

At the Global Beauty and Fashion Tech Forum, a roundtable discussion featuring:

Christina Rodriguez, Editor and Founder of Beaute in Tech,
Tara Sparks, Executive Director for Global Media and Partnerships for Estee Lauder,
Tom Deering, VP for Teads Studio, North America,
Jonathan Grubin, Founder and CEO of SoPost,
Kate Kenner Archibald, Chief Marketing Officer for Dash Hudson

covered the utility of AR and AI tech in the evolving world of advertising, and how this new level of engagement is impacting sampling.

Watch the full conversation below

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Branching Out to New Ecosystems

Launching AR and AI on your own site is one thing. Taking it to someone else’s playground — like social or search platforms — is another beast entirely. You don’t control the architecture, the rules change, and yes, it’s a headache.

But when done right? Magic happens. You tap into audiences who’ve never heard of your brand and still get them to try on your products — virtually, instantly. It’s product discovery 2.0, and it opens up fresh conversion highways you didn’t even know existed.

“Recently, we've launched programs with Google, YouTube, and Snapchat where consumers on these platforms can start to discover our products, and try them on within those own ecosystems,” says Tara Sparks of Estee Lauder. “On Google search, for example, consumers are starting to explore different makeup products, different beauty products, and without ever leaving the search experience, they can start to try on and pick out their perfect shade for them.”

These innovative, interactive product experiences are yielding significant results. Because while creating these engagement engines is important for brand awareness, success metrics in sales and conversion are the benchmark at the end of the day.

“Across all brands we've seen consistently strong results,” Sparks says. “We've seen lifts in search lift, which means that consumers are not only seeing this experience, and they're going onto Google search and searching for our brands. So this has been proven to be very successful.”

Finding New Avenues for Engagement

Social and search aren’t the only playgrounds. AR and AI beauty tech are breaking into new spaces — editorial included. Think: readers mid-scroll on beauty articles, served a sleek VTO ad without leaving the page.

“The ad slot loads on the page within the editorial content. So the user's kind of scrolling on the page that served an interactive ad. And then the user is given a call to action to try on,” says Tom Deering of Teads.

“They then click that. And it will then launch the interactive AR experience or VTO experience that we're then pulling in directly into the ad unit. So a real kind of seamless experience for the user, and keeping them in that publisher environment.”

By leveraging this innovative user experience within an editorial setting, beauty brands are able to expose new audiences to their products in the most engaging way possible, at scale. And, through data insights, can ensure the most impact.

“From a reach point of view, you have a great opportunity there.” Deering says. “We can overlay our targeting capabilities so we can kind of drill down into that reach, whether that be through contextual targeting, audience targeting. We're ensuring that we're hitting that user with the right message at the right time, and making the campaign as effective and efficient as possible.”

Building a More Efficient, Personalized, and Effective Sampling Strategy

Product discovery and engagement is a major first step for brands. In the past, cosmetics brands would have the luxury of an in-store experience to guide customers through their buying journey.

A key part of this experience was sampling; enabling customers to try products on and get a sense for feel and understand how they look wearing it. With a digital shopping experience, sampling needs to be much more intentional and focused.

Once a customer has engaged with a virtual try-on in an interactive ad, if they haven’t clicked through or converted, offering product samples can get a customer over the finish line to a purchase.

The sampling process can’t be universal, however. Not only is it economically unfeasible to send out thousands of samples to customers, but this unfocused approach is unlikely to convert customers interested in specific SKUs. Plus, it creates a whole lot of waste.

“We often saw that, yes, people are very interested in this brand or this specific product, but then there would be a level of drop off post-trial because they hadn't received a shade that was right for them,” says SoPost’s Jonathan Grubin. “And what we've seen since really integrating Perfect Corp's technology into our platform is that we've been able to improve the shade matching rate by 27%, which is essentially meaning that 27% more consumers received the right shade from sampling when they're engaging with VTO as opposed to just going through and selecting a color swatch which they hope might be the right fit.

So that's huge wastage reduction there. And we're also seeing that it drives much higher campaign performance across many of the KPIs that we track.”

As innovations in beauty tech become more pervasive, the data learnings from customer engagements with these tools are creating opportunities that didn’t exist before. The integration of AR and AI technology has gone beyond the platforms that brands own, and moving into new and exciting spaces where product discovery can be immediately answered with engagement, and fostered through conversion in one seamless experience.

AI and Data: Personalization Without Compromise

Here’s the challenge: how do you personalize ads without creeping out your users? Enter differential privacy, synthetic data, and AI models trained without real PII.

This is where privacy and AI meet. Smart marketers use tools that respect user anonymity but still feed their AI engines the insights needed to optimize. It’s ethical, effective, and essential.

If you’re building with artificial data, you’re doing it right. If you’re still scraping old-school data lists, you’re doing it risky.

AI and Advertising FAQs

What is AI in advertising?

AI in advertising refers to the use of machine learning to deliver personalized, optimized ad experiences. It predicts, adapts, and improves in real time.