The Campaign

We realized that if teens take many selfies before sharing only one, there must be billions of selfies lying around on their phones that make them feel terrible about their appearance. Also, there’s one thing teenagers in every generation have loved and treasured as a source of joy and positivity – music. So, we invented a brand new way to take each un-shared selfie (a source of negativity) and translate it into an optimistic, cheerful song to prove to teenagers that every one of their photos (and by extension, their real selves) are worthy of love and appreciation. If your selfie inspired an objective third-party to think of awesome music, maybe you’re a way more wonderful a person than you realize. Presenting Selfie Soundtracks. Get a confidence-boosting song for every selfie, no matter how you look. The idea’s tagline: Who needs ‘likes’ to feel likeable?

Creative Execution

Selfie Soundtracks was brought to life as a Facebook Messenger chat bot feature. It used Google Cloud Vision’s API to understand the facial expressions and emotions in users’ unshared selfies. After identifying this, it matched the selfie to a Spotify song, being mindful to select tracks that were perfectly appropriate for a particular selfie. For example, a cheerful selfie might have served up a happy song, a selfie with a blank/dull look might have led to a song about smiling/laughing or being more accepting of yourself. Selfie Soundtracks song recommendations were regularly updated and improved based on user activity. Every Selfie Soundtrack was playable within the bot, without ever needing to leave and, most importantly, without ever needing to share anything. This removed the biggest source of teenagers’ anxiety – likes on social media. Launch date: August 30, 2017. Launch market: Indonesia. Campaign mechanics: Facebook Messenger chat bot. “Always On” owned media channel, running in parallel with paid media product campaigns.

Positive, confidence-boosting, anxiety-busting Selfie Soundtracks played: 600,000+ minutes (30,000+ users, estimated average Selfie Soundtracks generated per user = 5, average song duration = 4 minutes*). * Source: Vox.com research based on MusicBrainz.org data (https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/6003271/why-are-songs-3-minutes-long) Repeat users: 83.33% - 25,000+ users chose to subscribe to reminders and come back for more. Sales: 55% of users made a purchase using a bot-exclusive coupon, versus a target of only 10%. Selfie Soundtrack-related sales contributed to 6% of total sales; e-commerce normally accounts for only 0.6% of sales in Indonesia, so it was incredible for a chat bot to deliver 10X that amount. The massive success of Selfie Soundtracks in Indonesia has encouraged Clean & Clear to adapt the chat bot for India and the Middle East in 2018, and other countries and regions soon after.

Indonesia was identified as the ideal market for a small scale launch (to gauge interest and test the idea before rolling out to other markets) because Indonesian teens are very savvy skin care consumers, 64% of whom use smartphones. What’s more, Clean & Clear sales in Indonesia had stagnated in recent years, with the brand underperforming on key brand equity metrics. The availability of and access to cutting-edge AI and machine learning image recognition software was identified as a fantastic opportunity that would work perfectly with a mobile-centric platform like Facebook Messenger. It would also be possible to integrate music using the Spotify API and playlists. All of this would be possible practically instantly, with intelligent UI/UX helping to ensure a seamless, interruption-free experience for users.