Yves Saint Laurent Campaign

Client: YSL x Dentsu Campaign: Black Opium Channel: CTV, Display, YouTube, and Native.

About the campaign

About the brand.

Yves Saint Laurent’s Black Opium is a widely recognized fragrance celebrated for its sensual, edgy, and captivating qualities. As part of the L’Oréal Groupe, YSL Beauty continually explores innovative strategies to maintain its market position, attract new consumers, and foster brand loyalty in a highly competitive luxury beauty landscape.

Challenge & Objectives.

Like many luxury brands, YSL Black Opium faced the challenge of reaching a diverse yet highly segmented audience with precise and impactful messaging that aligns with the brand’s identity. This needed to occur while optimizing advertising spending and generating measurable results. Their key objectives included: Increasing brand awareness and engagement, while keeping media costs down.

Strategy & Media Activation

We led the strategy in partnership with Dentsu, utilizing DV360 and The Trade Desk platforms. Our monthly budget exceeded $3 million, allowing us to reach over 50 markets across Europe, North America, LATAM, and APAC. The campaign employed various channels, including CTV, display ads, YouTube, and native advertising. We were involved in all aspects of end-to-end programmatic media buying, including strategy and planning, campaign setup, optimization, and troubleshooting. Additionally, we negotiated and activated direct deals for premium CTV and display inventory, while also managing Private Marketplaces and Programmatic Guaranteed deals.

Outcomes

The YSL’s Black Opium campaign achieved strong performance across several key metrics.

Viewability: Exceeding benchmarks by 10-15%.
CTV VTR: Around 78% on average, peaking at 85% on certain premium inventories.
CTR: Around 0.35% avg. on Display and Native (slightly above industry norm ~0.20%)
Reach: 150M unique users globally over a 6-month period.
Cost Efficiency: Reduced CPMs by 15% through smart deal setups and segmenting.