2016 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Unilever is amongst the leading FMCG companies in the region, with more than 400 brands focused on health and wellbeing. Closeup is one of the key oral care brands of Unilever Gulf. In a fiercely competitive oral care category, Closeup differentiates itself on the functional promise of Fresh Breath and White Teeth, leading to an emotional positioning to make people look and feel great, laddering up to the social benefit of bringing people closer to each other.

The Brief

To create a corporate campaign that celebrates Closeup’s history and tradition as a pioneer in oral care for the past 49 years.

How the final design was conceived

Closeup is all about putting perfect smiles on people’s faces and after a lot of research, we came to a final conclusion - in the early 1900s smiling in photographs was frowned upon, one of the main reasons was poor oral hygiene. So maybe if Closeup existed in the early 1900s, people would smile more in photographs. We gathered personal and authentic photographs of happy moments in peoples’ lives where they would normally be smiling, taken before 1967 - Closeup’s invention date, and told the real story of those in the photographs. To achieve our final outcome we had to make sure we curated original and authentic imagery of real happy moments captured before 1967. When combined, they positioned Closeup as the product that changed photographs from “say prune” to “say cheese”.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

Our final outcome reminds people of Closeup’s main purpose in a series of posters and press ads showing real photographs of happy moments captured before 1967. The twist is that no one was smiling back then and a main reason was poor oral hygiene. Combing these photographs with their stories and signing off with Closeup, creates a strong positioning for the brand as the pioneer in oral care.