How Estée Lauder’s Too Faced created its first AI ad campaign with Adobe

As beauty brands face pressure to produce more content faster, Estée Lauder’s cosmetics brand Too Faced launched its first fully AI-generated campaign in March for its Ribbon Wrapped Lash Mascara product.

The campaign comes amid swirling rumors of a reported sale by parent company Estée Lauder. Founded by Jerrod Blandino and Jeremy Johnson in 1998, Too Faced was acquired by Estée Lauder in 2016 for $1.45 billion, becoming one of the beauty giant’s younger-skewing brands with cheeky product names like Born This Way foundation.

Warissara Muangsaen, VP and global creative director at Too Faced, spoke with Retail Brew about Too Faced’s new campaign created in beta using Adobe’s AI-powered Firefly Video Model—which creates video content by converting text prompts and still images into visual clips or animation—before the tool’s public release.

In the ad, a ballerina spins in a music box as a black ribbon unfurls, expanding through the room until it wraps around a woman’s eyelashes. The bulk of the ad was created in roughly two weeks, Muangsaen said, adding “AI can be useful to you if you’re an expert in the field you’re using it for.”

In this case, Firefly helped speed up the overall creative workflow. “It makes us faster,” Muangsaen said.

Many of these highly specific, storytelling-driven concepts, Muangsaen explained, don’t exist visually yet. Phase one of the ad involved ideation and prompting, followed by storyboard and frame generation in phase two, video animation in phase three, editing and assembly in phase four, and finally, app testing and functionality checks in phase five.

“The editing takes shorter times,” she said. “We did a holiday shoot this year; it usually takes four days [to edit].” However, with Firefly it took one day, she added.

Too Faced also trained Firefly on its existing product imagery—foundation swatches, mascara textures, glitter finishes—so the AI could accurately replicate the brand’s visual look and feel. This allowed Too Faced to amplify existing creative assets rather than investing in additional content, which freed up budget. “What that means is I could have one extra day shooting a model,” Muangsaen said. Money saved usually gets repurposed on getting, say, a top beauty influencer for Too Faced, she added.

The larger idea was also to get members within her team, including visual merchandisers and photo retouchers, to get excited about a completely new way of working, Muangsaen said. “That was a part of the experiment itself that, ‘Hey, there's no right or wrong. Let’s just jump into it. Let’s see what it can help you [with], and let’s see what it comes out looking like.’”

Zoom out: “We’ve seen that using AI tools to enhance content, video, and photography is really one of the top use cases for generative AI,” Sky Canaves, eMarkater principal analyst for retail and e-commerce, told Retail Brew. “It’s become pretty advanced.”

“Brands have to be increasingly agile, particularly in this very competitive and trend-driven space like beauty,” she said. “These kinds of tools can really help them to keep their content fresh and appealing to audiences.”

However, Canaves added, there is the risk of creating content that looks generic: “That’s where the human touch really comes in to really refine that content and enhance it and guide the AI tools to get the desired output.”