Meet the Makers: WPP Black Ops & SK-II — ‘Vs.’ series

YoeGin Chang: You know, a lot of the ideas were even starting off like “What's the most ridiculous thing that a skin care brand could do?”

Delphine Buttin: As a brand, you’re always trying to look for a platform to make your messages relevant. Olympic is a huge global platform that we thought then would be the right medium for us. Just like Olympic is a platform, you also need an actual media platform to reach as many consumers as possible. And definitely YouTube was that for us. But we knew it was going to be a difficult ride. How are we going to be able to even be present? We’re like this skin care, female brand, no association to the sports. And actually, if you look at the campaign, it has nothing to do with sport. And, actually, it was not even the brief.

We realized there is a lot of pressures, expectations, rules that the society puts on us and that can stop you from becoming the best version of yourself. At SK-II, we decided that we wanted to make a stand and to talk about those pressures. And so we've called this platform Change Destiny. We knew we wanted to do something big and something daring. We were working with WPP on other aspects for media with their Mediacom team, and we reached out to them, because they had an interesting structure, WPP Black Ops, and we briefed them out and the campaign came to life.

Nihar Das: Once we came into this project we realized we are dealing with a triangle of immixability: SK-II, the younger audience, and Olympics. So the challenge for us was to bring these three immixable elements together through the campaign. So we handpicked people from different disciplines and companies inside of WPP, but not limiting ourselves to the bounds of WPP: creative technologist, out-and-out creatives, social anthropologist. That's the definition of what Black Ops is. It's always formed against a specific challenge, a bold problem. And when we put together a specific handpicked team to solve it. Once we solve it, we dismantle the team and move on to the next problem.

Siddika Dehlvi: When we started this journey, we already had the seven athletes, but each of them had a beautiful backstory.

Buttin: We talked to many athletes. We were looking for those athletes that were going to be able to talk about what they were going through.

Chang: First off, we have Simone Biles, and she fights against her trolls. We have Liu Xiang, who fights obsession. Ishikawa Kasumi-san fights expectations, Ayaka Takahashi and Misaki Matsutomo, they fight what we call the machines. Mahina Maeda fights beauty expectation. Takamatsu fights against a lot of physical elements.

Das: It wasn't a story that we crafted and took to the athletes. It's a real human story we discovered in each athlete’s life. So she wasn't acting into it. She was enacting her own life.

Dehlvi: We don't want to produce another ad campaign. We wanted to create a cultural impact.

Chang: The way we launched this “Vs.” series was not as an advertisement, but more as films.

Dehlvi: We decided that we are going to turn SK-II into a content studio, and we created SK-II Studio and produced their first ever anthology series. We knew that the real impact would come when people see it all together, right? And I think that was made possible, because we had YouTube as a platform.

Das: Once we had a clear vision of what the anthology series would look like, the question of platform become very, very crucial for us. The ideas have become so big and so universal that we had to look at billions of people. That wouldn't have been possible with any of these paid platforms. Democratic access, binge-viewing without having to pay anything, and the fact that we wanted to take it to billions of people made YouTube the single choice.

Dehlvi: I mean, we've crossed 1 billion views, but, I think beyond views, what was more important is the kind of positive sentiment around the campaign. What we're really proud of is the small dent in the culture that we were able to make in terms of expectations around women.

Chang: For the campaign and the platform Change Destiny, this is something that we are going to stand by in the the foreseeable future.

Buttin: I'm glad to be working for a brand that is dedicating a team and an amount of money that will enable to spark conversation on important topics.

Dehlvi: We will sometimes succeed. We will sometimes fail, and that's okay as long as we keep going and keep trying. I think that's the most important.