The Campaign

First time ever, the virtual idol Miku Hatsune appeared in a shampoo ad. Flipping convention in the shampoo industry of beautiful models with silky smooth hair in an ad, we used Miku Hatsune to aim at diffusing a web movie knowing she had high target awareness and fitted well with digital. She perfectly copied how Scarlett Johansson acted in the ad which was aired on the terrestrial television broadcasting during the same period. She made a step forward to become the face of LUX in an ad beyond people’s fixed thinking on what virtual pop character should be like. We appealed that making a step following their hearts would broaden their worlds that they had not known before.

Creative Execution

For the women in their 20’s who are used to being surrounded with lots of information, it is difficult to land the message with a little impact. We planned a PR plan that would blow their mind, and would be on the TV news. At the first-ever Miku’s full orchestra event, the CM was shown for the first time, where many media added to their news topline. Also, when we first aired the TVC, on the exact same day as Miku’s birthday, our target women noticed the buzz and began to watch and share online. After 2months of the product release, the product was often sold out in many stores, with lots of success.

The campaign was exposed in many media such as terrestrial television stations to more than 400 kinds of digital media, etc. The movie, the core of the initiative, was played more than 4 million times in YouTube and ranked top in Japan YouTube Ads Leaderboard in the second half of 2016. (Selected as the hottest ad) In Twitter, our key media for the diffusion, we achieved more than 100 million impressions on relevant tweets during the period. The target youth favored the message and there were more than 1 million engagement. With the above achievements, we exceeded the initial sales target of 120% to the 1st half of the year to 130% becoming a great contributor to the sales.

From research, we found out that it is essential to speak to the women in their 20’s, who are most interested in straight hair, but has low attention of the brand. Previously, LUX has featured Hollywood stars in their advertisements, mostly on TV, but in fact, women in their 20’s felt this was too pushy and that the brand was not suited for them. In order to reach them with high relevancy, we looked into their culture and media channels, and came up with Miku’s music and character, which had high awareness within 20’s. The contents were spread via internet, where we can reach youngsters with high relevancy.