week 5 popular advertisement

Pantene Chrysalis: You can shine

This Thailand Pantene advertisement "You can shine" was released in "September 2008 and showed on television, cinemas and online" (1). It is extremely popular that it has over 6 million views on Youtube. It is about a deaf girl violist goes through all the challenges and finally succeed in gaining others' appreciation and self-confidence. 

It is obviously an unconventional shampoo advertisement because of its long length (4 minutes) and touching story. The common shampoo advertisement always show a beauty's smooth hair only (Below) but not a story about the beauty. Although during the final performance of the girl, the girl's hair is as smooth as the beauties' hairs in other ordinary advertisements, the focus is not on the hair but the amazing musical performance of a deaf girl. As audience has get used to the boring shampoo advertisement, this advertisement can easily catch people's attention. 

Pantene Print advertisement: http://kenarthurhair.blogspot.hk/2011/12/olga-kurylenko-for-pantene-nature.html

Grey Thailand’s (advertising agency of this advertisement ) Chief Operating Officer, Shilpa Swaroop, mentioned that "the campaign’s main objective was more of an emotional connection with Thai consumers” (1). The agency has already succeed in connecting the emotions with Thai consumers and even with the world. In the advertisement, the deaf girl is teased by her jealous classmate, for example, the classmate said "you are wasting everyone's time" to her and pushed her music stand to the floor. Luckily, the street violinist encouraged her to keep on learning violin and told her that it's good "to be different from others". Then her violin was destroyed by gangsters. The climax is that she used plastic tapes to fix her violin and all the audience stood up and clapped for her after the performance.  The message behind the advertisement is to be yourself and glow from both inside (by gaining confidence) and outside (the shiny hair). This explains why the slogan " You can shine" is used at the end of the story. The positive thinking touches the audience's heart and makes the advertisement memorable. Instead of stressing on the effect of shampoo on hair, the advertisement gives Pantene a positive and open image. Pantene is then stood out from all other competitors and audience will have a good feeling about it. 

A good advertisement also needs good marketing, the campaign is not only shown on youtube, but also on blog and metacafe which encourage people to get involved and comment about it. This helps spreading the campaign and further increasing the popularity of the advertisement.  


(1) Reference: http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2009/pantene-violinist-shines-in-chrysalis/