The Brazilian cosmetics company O Boticário has released a Mother's Day advertisement that takes its time — a quality increasingly rare in an era when most commercials seem to be edited by someone late for a train.
The spot, created for the brand's annual holiday campaign, follows the emotional journey of a mother watching her child grow up and eventually leave home. It is, in other words, a commercial about the thing that Mother's Day cards have been about since the invention of Mother's Day cards, though rendered here with the production values one associates with prestige television.
O Boticário, which has been one of Brazil's dominant beauty retailers for decades, has long favored advertising that leans into sentiment rather than product demonstration. (What, you were expecting a 60-second tutorial on moisturizer application?) The approach has served the company well in a market where emotional resonance tends to outperform ingredient lists.
The "empty nest" narrative is, of course, well-worn territory for advertisers seeking to move product in the weeks before the second Sunday in May. What distinguishes this particular execution, according to those who have seen it, is its willingness to sit with the quieter moments of parenthood rather than rushing toward the reunion and the ribbon-wrapped gift box.
Whether Brazilian consumers will respond by purchasing fragrance sets remains, as always, the question that no amount of critical appreciation can answer. The advertising industry has never been short on beautifully crafted work that failed to move merchandise, nor on crude spots that sold remarkable quantities of things nobody needed.
O Boticário, for its part, seems content to keep betting on the former approach — a strategy that has worked well enough to keep the lights on since 1977.
Original story published in adage.com: "O Boticário explores the long ride to the empty nest in Mother’s Day ad - Ad Age"