• Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required), Wednesday, July 12, 2006 11:46 AM

Unilever is taking a unique approach in introducing its new Sunsilk shampoo in the U.S. by running an ad campaign featuring three actors who play a girl’s best gay friends.  The effort supports the company’s Sunsilk shampoo brand and is one of the consumer-product company's biggest launches.  In the ads, the three gay friends will be positioned as style experts who write advice columns in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Star, and appear as commentators on television where they diagnose consumers' hair problems. Unilever settled upon the characters as the best way to target 20-something women after quizzing hundreds of potential customers. "We found that women talk to each other as friends, but there is still a bit of jealousy," says Esther Lem, vice president for Unilever's hair-care brands in North America. Instead, women admired the "best gay friend" character on TV shows like "Sex and the City" and "Will and Grace." Unilever plans to spend $200 million to promote the brand during the next 12 months, a big budget for the supermarket aisle. "In a category as competitive as hair care is, we had to go big or go home," says Stan Cook, Unilever's vice president of U.S. hair operations.

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