Clinique: Unique Sizzle Reel

Client

CliniqueSkincare and makeup

Film

Clinique UniqueA brand manifesto

Format

Sizzle reel1:44

Built from

Five decades of CliniqueArchive ads to creator videos

Soundtrack

Beyoncé, UNIQUEFrom Renaissance, 2022

When

December 2022Closing out the year

Clinique•Sizzle reel•1:44•2022This reel plays without sound

Some brands need a paragraph to say who they are; Clinique needed one word, and a crowd of faces to prove it.

Clinique Unique was the name Clinique gave to the way it wanted to speak about itself: born different, a brand of firsts, a category of one. Clinique wrote the manifesto. Our job was to make it move.

So we treated the script like a lyric. Each line lands on the beat as type, then hands over to the picture: heritage sketches and archive ads for a brand of firsts, glass and light for the future, and then the faces, one after another, for every unique face.

We cut the reel to UNIQUE, from Beyoncé’s Renaissance, which had come out that summer. The song all but spells out the brief, so we leaned in: we edited her vocal until the hook sounded like Beyoncé singing Clinique, Unique, and let every cut and every line of type land where the track put it. We can’t play the track here, so the reel plays silent, but the rhythm is still inspired by that song.

Five decades in one reel

The raw material runs the whole length of Clinique’s life: black-and-white archive ads, the three-step system as it looked in 1968 and again in 1997, a vintage extra-help makeup spot, ink sketches of the counters, and then the brand as it looked in 2022, with campaign films, product animation, retail spaces in China and social content shot by creators in the US and the UK. Dozens of films made by different teams over five decades, for different screens, many of them vertical. We cut them into one horizontal rhythm, so an archive ad, a product render and a creator’s selfie video all feel like one film.

Uniquely, product by product

The middle of the film is a run of promises, uniquely highest efficacy, uniquely rigorous safety, and each one gets a product to stand behind it. We let the hero objects breathe: green lipsticks lined up like a chorus, a red and gold set lit like a cocktail bar, foundation bottles on a pale shelf.

For every unique face

Then the words get bigger and simpler, Clarity, Bravery, Optimism, and the film turns into a portrait wall. Different ages, skin tones, cities and cameras, from studio campaign frames to creators filming themselves at home. It is the argument of the whole reel: Clinique is unique because the people who wear it are.

The Clinique sizzle shelf

Unique sits alongside the other reels we have cut for Clinique: the Innovation Sizzle Reel, the Love Sizzle Reel and A Brand Sizzle That Spans Decades. Each one asks the same brand a different question. This one asked it to describe itself in a single word.

ServicesEditing·Motion Graphics·Branded Content·Creative Direction