A woman with
hair like ice cream swirls
Her face is printed on an ice cream cone holder
By Toni Fitzgerald
Feb 23, 2010
From far away, it looks like any other soft-serve cone, with layer upon wavy layer of ice cream swirling up several inches high.
But take a closer look at the cone and you notice a woman's head printed on the orange paper cone holder. Her face appears at the very top, right where the cone and the ice cream meet.
The woman's face is looking toward the bottom of the cone. The picture cuts off right at her hairline, which is where the ice cream begins.
You get it. The image comes together. The ice cream is the woman's hairdo, its swirls mimicking the flow of a woman's coif, and without a hair out of place, as if she'd just come from a salon.
Midway down the orange cone holder there are six words in white letters: "Sweet & Lovely: Style For You."
The cone holder was an ad for Leekaja Hairbis, an upscale hair salon in Seoul, South Korea. Pull off the wrapper and you found printed inside a coupon for 37 percent off the cost of a hair styling.
Clever idea? Sure. But more important it helped the salon deal with a perception problem. Though it had been around 37 years, it had an image among young Koreans as being too expensive and traditional.
The shop wanted to reach out to high school and college students with an alternative media campaign that would connect with them on their own turf.
Leekaja Hairbis' agency, Diamond Ogilvy in Seoul, did some scouting and discovered a shopping mall in downtown Seoul where young people hung out.
"At one teen hotspot a group of young girls sat together chatting and enjoying soft-serve ice cream," says Yeonju Shin, creative director at the agency. "This scene served as the base for the campaign idea."
The agency noted that the shape of the ice cream atop the cones was similar to the soft, curled hairstyles popular at the salon.
Diamond Ogilvy came up with the wrapper design and ordered more than 1,000 of them. For one day in November, the agency rented out the mall ice cream shop and distributed 1,000 of the wrapper/coupons.
One worry was that the coupons would become saturated with melted ice cream, making them unusable. To prevent that, servers pointed out the wrappers to the customers when they received their cones.
"This way we could ensure that those who wished to redeem the coupon would remove it before the ice cream melted," Shin explains.
The campaign worked because it was based on one of the most basic concepts of alternative advertising, which is taking two completely unrelated things and pulling them together to create an image or idea that connects to the product.
The ice cream-hairstyle connection is not obvious until you see the actual image, after which it becomes perfectly clear how they relate.
The salon was pleased with the results as 100 people redeemed their coupons.
"People were impressed by the freshness of using ice cream for a salon promotion," Shin says.
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