The Estée Lauder Cos.’ Aude Gandon on Taking the Right Career Risks

by · WWD
Aude GandonAllie Joseph/WWD

Aude Gandon has perhaps taken the road less traveled to get to her current post as executive vice president, global chief digital and marketing officer at The Estée Lauder Cos.

“I started in the ad industry, and I think that was one of the best tools you can have; learning brand strategy, creative development, production, and how to listen — because you sit opposite to a client and you need to understand what they say, but also what they don’t say,” said Gandon, who went on to join Google and Nestlé before landing at Estée Lauder, at the 2026 Women in Power conference.

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“The riskiest [move] was when I left the ad industry for Google,” she continued. “I had to let go of an industry where I had gained seniority and trust to join an industry where nobody knew about me, and the compensation system was also very different — which is important when you’re a woman with two young kids; a lot of the compensation was made on dollars and stock, so I took a major hit on my base salary.”

Nonetheless, the decision was fruitful: When Gandon made the move in the mid-2010s, Google was one of the biggest disruptors in not just tech but culture, and her learnings at the company have helped to inform her approach to bringing a similar digital disruption to Estée Lauder, which this year turns 80 years old.

Her role at Estée Lauder is a multifaceted one, combining marketing with overall digital innovation at the company.

“Consumers shouldn’t suffer from internal silos and credentials of how a company is organized,” said Gandon, adding that this holistic executive approach is better suited to how connected brand discovery and commerce are today. “It’s not for us to decide what consumers want to buy, we just have to make sure we develop the right experiences and understand who they are. That is the big opportunity…

“There’s a lot of noise, and everybody has FOMO, so it’s very difficult to decide what is just noise and what is going to be a very big evolution,” she said.

One way Estée Lauder has been able to cut through the noise and zero in on what it should be focusing on has been allowing Meta’s Muse AI tool to review content, records and articles about its portfolio of brands over the years, and then draw patterns about what it is that makes the brands iconic.

“It was mind-blowing to see what the AI came up with. It came up with very clean components of what makes the brands iconic, and what you shouldn’t change,” said Gandon, adding that it has been helpful in keeping the brands rooted in their respective heritages while still evolving to meet the moment.

The next step in that evolution? A new partnership with AI marketing platform Profound to bolster the company’s GEO strategy.

“[It’s about] how do we make sure that our brands are represented accurately, but also prominently.”