In the industry of high-end cosmetics, how does a company reach out to male audiences? Put a little sci-fi into it.
That was the goal of Kiehl’s Since 1851 when they “launched” their campaign “How to: Put Space on Your Face.” The campaign features the new Kiehl’s product, the Oil Elimintaor 24-hour Anti-Shine Moisturizer for Men.
The 2-½-minute video shows a team of engineers building a small, simple spacecraft that has one purpose: to launch a bottle of Oil Eliminator Anti-Shine Moisturizer past the atmosphere and into space. (The behind-the-scenes video reveals that the engineers prepared months in advance for this.) The bottle-turned-astronaut makes it back to Earth after successfully completing its mission – a few minutes in space.
Why go through all this trouble just to send one bottle into space? Well, Kiehl’s wanted to showcase the moisturizer’s key ingredient: Aerolite, a substance engineered by NASA. Made from aerogel, it’s 99.98% air, making it the lightest man-made solid on Earth, so it’s really light on a user’s face. Apparently Aerolite can absorb four times its weight in oil and breaks up sweat from skin, making it a very effective ingredient in oil elimination.
Although the video doesn’t say all of this, it can still grab attention with the visual premise accompanied by Star Wars-type music. At the very least, it will capture the attention of sci-fi fans, which include quite a few men. This will also feed into the current advertising trend of infusing space and technology into social campaigns (e.g. Red Bull and “the Highest Free Fall”, Watch Dogs “Real World Hacks”, etc.). In fact, Kiehl’s is currently running a contest where winners will be able to have action figures of themselves sent to space on a similar spacecraft, and gifted a picture of them in action.
More than moisturizer? Affirmative.
~ Jay H. Kim, Summer Associate, The S3 Agency
