For its biggest campaign to date, Jones Road got a helping hand from AI.
On Wednesday, the cosmetics company unveiled the Just Enough campaign promoting its new lightweight foundation product of the same name, priced at $44. While a lot of beauty marketing centres around claims about product sensoriality or complex ingredients, Jones Road bet that its customers were more concerned with how the products perform and fit into their lives. For better insight on those points, it turned to AI.
Using AI tools like ChatGPT Deep Research and GigaBrain, the company “basically trawled the whole internet,” said Cody Plofker, the brand’s chief executive, collecting thousands of customer reviews from its website and social-media platforms like Reddit and YouTube to identify its customers’ key lifestyle needs and understand their likes and dislikes about beauty products. With that information, it created five “personas” modelled by real people in the campaign, with four of them being women scouted by the brand rather than professional models. One persona features a mum doing a school run, another refers to having a busy day of Zoom calls, while another refers to needing a product suitable for wear during exercise.
“I’ve always been someone that has tried to hack my life and figure out how I can still run a company, be a mom, be on the PTA, go to exercise, meet a friend,” said Bobbi Brown, who founded Jones Road in 2020, four years after leaving the namesake cosmetics line she sold to Estée Lauder Companies in the 1990s. “This campaign made sense to me.” Brown also appears in the campaign.
Just Enough is the brand’s biggest multimedia campaign to date, including six television commercials, direct mail, organic and paid social with an “eight figure” investment from the brand all in all. Beauty companies are increasingly tapping television and larger-scale out-of-home advertising campaigns to reach new audiences, with brands like Cerave and E.l.f launching Super Bowl campaigns, while others experiment with billboards, pop-ups and longer-form social content.
According to Jones Road, the AI-derived insights helped to empower the company’s creative team by providing information that would normally have taken a human weeks to compile “in a matter of minutes,” according to Plofker.
The process also brought up new insights that the company hadn’t considered before. Plofker said he realised many customers felt like they needed to choose between a complexion product that provided enough coverage to alleviate the appearance of redness or other skin conditions and a product that didn’t actively exacerbate them. When marketing Just Enough, the brand made sure to communicate how the formula benefits the skin over time as well as offering immediate cosmetic benefits. He also said the exercise showed that some shoppers wanted foundations without SPF, rather than uniformly seeing the addition of SPF as a benefit, a possible consideration for future product development.
Plofker said he sees more opportunities in future to streamline processes like research or perhaps editing, but Jones Road’s core customers — and Brown herself — are still passionate about human creativity. On social media, especially in the 70,000-strong dedicated “Roadies” Facebook group, customers praise the brand’s realness, with its straight-talking marketing and usage of “real women” as models.
Brown said as a makeup artist, she’s still an “old-fashioned creative girl,” adding she finds AI “cool, fascinating and scary” all at once. “But I’m not afraid of what I don’t know,” she said, noting the beauty industry has changed drastically since she founded her original company back in the 1990s. “I just never fight it. I just go with it,” she said.
In the future, Plofker said AI could be useful for further research, or perhaps more rote tasks like video editing, saying the business has a small team and that automating workflows can free staff up to spend more time on creative projects or strategic initiatives. Notably, the company still wants to cast real human models, and let humans run its creative processes.
“When it comes to AI, there’s brilliance and creativity, but there’s got to be realness,” said Brown.
Sign up to The Business of Beauty newsletter, your complimentary, must-read source for the day’s most important beauty and wellness news and analysis.
