Beauty-care firms crack the feminist psyche and wallet
Focus on women's aspirations and impediments makes ads by P&G and Dove an instant success
On the evening of December 19, a Pantene commercial ran on US television that skirted all the formal avenues of parent company Procter & Gamble's typical advertising process.
Storyboards were not pored over in P&G's Cincinnati headquarters. Average Americans did not provide feedback in consumer research groups. Media planners did not work months in advance to buy advertising slots.
Instead, on November 7, the one-minute commercial had been released online in the Philippines by the local Pantene unit. It was never intended to reach viewers in the United States. And it was hardly an advertisement about shampoo at all.
For brands to be relevant in today’s world, they need to connect on a cultural level
Yet after four weeks online, it caught the attention of millions of Americans. So, plans changed. Fast. The video, which shows a male and a female executives going through the same workday but experiencing different stereotypes based on their genders, is the latest in a line of viral ad campaigns that tap explicitly into a very raw, emotional sense of both female insecurity and empowerment.
Dove did something similar earlier this year when it released an online video called about women's damaged self-image. That video has had more than 60 million views on YouTube alone.
For P&G, the world's biggest consumer products maker, the instant success of a video it never intended to take global forced the North American Pantene team to quickly shift gears.
A week ago, when the ad unexpectedly hit a critical mass of online US viewers, the company started talking about airing the Asian web video in its original form on American network television. It then crunched its media planning and buying process, which normally takes months, into a mere five days - buying a primetime commercial slot on major short notice.
By Thursday last week, the web experiment that started in the Philippines aired during ABC's iconic news retrospective programme, .
