The Campaign

Allergan’s BotoxVista needed a unique way to attract the attention of 40-64 year old Japanese women. In a country where natural treatments are more popular and women are meticulous with their make-up routine, few see the need to undergo Botox treatment. But there is a time when Japanese women don’t look their best, and it’s something they can’t see when doing their make-up in the morning. During the day, when we look at our phone on the train, or read an e-mail from our boss on our tablet, we’re unaware of how we look. Many women never see the face they make when they are concentrating, stressed, or angry, which results in the appearance of wrinkles. We wanted to make women aware of these “concentration lines.” In Japanese Noh theatre, there is a mask of a demon women called ‘Hanya.’ It’s a perfect dramatization of the face women don’t want to show the world. With spectacular results, our campaign used newspapers, trains, the “Japanese Times Square,” in-clinic materials, a newly designated “wrinkle day”, and an invented verb: “Hanyateru?” (“are you making a Hanya face?”) to drive our targets to the Botox Vista website.

The Brief

Our goal was specific, with a measurable KPI: to increase traffic to the website over the duration of the campaign by a minimum of 170,000 visitors. This KPI was determined based on an exhaustive analysis of the number of targets (women 40-64 yrs) and clinics in our campaign area.

Creative Execution

First, we registered April 8 as “shiwa-no-hi,” which in Japanese means both “wrinkle day” and “4-8” (“wrinkle day”). Over the course of two weeks leading up to Shiwa-no-hi, we conducted widespread transit and newspaper advertising. On April 8 itself, we we took over Shibuya’s famous “scramble crossing.”. Surrounded by three mega-sized screens, the exposure that comes from being broadcast in the scramble is enormous. “The Scramble” is notorious for people crossing while looking down at their phones. A perfect fit for our campaign, because when did look up, women saw our campaign. Finally, once driven to the clinic, an array of Hanya goods closed the loop.

The results demonstrated very clear success for the campaign. Against our target of 170,000 unique visitors to the site (http://shiwachiryo.com) during the campaign duration, we attracted a total of 179,576, representing 105.6% of our target.

In Japan, making age the enemy of beauty is a dangerous proposition. We needed a different strategy. The insight was that in the morning, women see their “neutral face” in the mirror. Not the worried, upset, or frustrated faces that can interfere with their beauty. To make this point with impact, we reached deep into Japanese culture, and found the “Hanya,” a demon from Japanese Noh theater. With its over-exaggerated frown, it’s a perfect mirror to hold up to our targets. The campaign features women in typical situations—for example, checking email on the train, and using an invented Japanese verb, the copy asks, ‘are you ‘Hanya-ing?’’ To make the most of a limited budget, we created a laser-focused 2-week campaign, advertising where women are most likely to be “Hanya-ing” (ie, in the train), leading to a newly designated “wrinkle day”—the centerpiece, in which we jacked “Tokyo’s Times Square.”