World’s best ads ever #13: Shiseido’s ‘High School Girls’ surprise millions
We asked our readers to vote for their favorite commercials of all time. Top creatives from the World Creative Rankings and The Drum’s Judges’ Club then ranked the ads. Now, we bring you the definitive 100 best TV and video ads of all time.
In 2015, Shiseido’s wanted a new ad campaign that would convey the fun of makeup to young people. Not a novel brief for a cosmetics company, but the execution was anything but ordinary.
The film – made in-house – sees the audience taken into a class of high school girls. In the frozen scene, the camera focuses on individuals who stare down the lens in what many viewers assumed was an apparent stereotypical expression of Japan’s kawaii culture, the culture of cute.
Instead, we then see the group being ‘undone‘, make-up artistry in reverse, which reveals the group of high school girls is actually a group of boys.
The film wanted to portray beauty in a new way and show that no matter the gender, ‘everyone can be pretty‘.
Within a few months, the ad had exceeded 10m views on YouTube. Director Show Yanagisawa from The Director‘s Guild and director of photography Jin Ohashi in particular were praised for the level of detail that went into the creation of the spot.
Shiseido was nominated for a string of awards and upon receiving the Best in Show at the 2016 New York Festival International Advertising Award, the brand’s creative director Masato Kosukegawa revealed just how much effort had gone into the shoot.
“We would like to say thank you to Show Yanagisawa, Jin Ohashi and of course the school ‘girls’ for their amazing patience to strike a pose and stand-still in a 7-hour-long shoot,” he said in his acceptance speech.