What the Hell Is This Giant Hairball Doing in New York?

A giant, grizzly, 10-foot ball of real human hair is rolling through the streets of New York, much to the horror of passers-by (and this writer). This is the advertising we love, and hate to see.

In partnership with Uncommon Creative Studio, Unilever Prestige haircare brand K18 is rolling a giant, 10 ft ball of real human hair through the streets of New York. Much to the horror of passers-by, the hairball represents the 167 billion hairs that New Yorkers lose to shedding, created to make the launch of the brand’s new longevity serum, FutureIQ™.

The bristly spectacle represents the 167 billion hairs New Yorkers lose to shedding and is the work of K18 and Uncommon Creative Studio, created to launch the Unilever Prestige haircare brand’s new longevity serum, FutureIQ. Dubbed ‘Tumblehair’, the rolling installation attempts to communicate the scale of premature hair ageing and everyday shedding in a way that’s impossible to ignore.

Uncommon creative directors Lauren Cooper and Cara Johnson tell LBB that when K18 approached them, one piece of intel really stuck: that the serum can help people retain up to 19,000 hairs after 90 days of consistent use.

Knowing they didn’t want to go down the route of something serious or sombre, they set out to make these numbers feel tangible. “Absurd, in this case, translates to unignorable, and that's what we always aim for,” they say.

But just because they were going for something absurd doesn’t mean they were treating the topic with careless hands. Wanting to be thoughtful about the way they spoke about such a sensitive subject also involved wanting to destigmatise it.

“There’s something reassuring about realising this scale – that this is a product that can help almost everyone," say Lauren and Cara. “That’s part of why we loved approaching the subject through humour and absurdity. We could make the conversation around hair shedding feel a little lighter and more approachable without ever making the joke about the people experiencing it. The hairball is the ridiculous part, not the problem itself.”

There are plenty of conventional ways this could have been approached, like film or OOH, but Lauren and Cara say the ambition at Uncommon is always to build what they call ‘narrative objects’. These are physical artefacts designed to convey a story in a single, striking visual that travels effortlessly, needing almost no explanation.

And while other approaches have their place, they say, “There’s nothing quite like dropping a massive, provocative, real-world object into New York and letting it tell the brand’s story as organically as possible, as people react to it live.

“We wanted them to encounter it, chase it down the street, take pictures of it, be slightly horrified by it, and, most importantly, talk about it.”

However, the idea of rolling a giant hairball through New York was much easier to conjure than bringing it to fruition. Doing so involved a huge amount of R&D, engineering, fabrication, and trial and error with dedicated production partners and makers at Pro Mobile Marketing and Uncommon Makers.

The pair explain that there exists an interesting tension with brand stunts, where the second you cover something in logos people understand they are looking at advertising and tune it out. Looking at Tumblehair, viewers will have absolutely no idea why it exists.

“That mystery is a huge part of the idea,” they elaborate. “We want people to stop, take pictures, send it to their friends and start asking, ‘What the hell is this giant hairball doing in New York?’ We love that the audience gets to discover the idea rather than having the answer handed to them immediately.”

Though it is all part of a greater plan to bring everything back to K18 and FutureIQ. The Tumblehair is set to finish rolling outside Sephora for the K18 Hair Longevity Lab for a VIP and customer experience on August 12th. But until then, they're letting this strange thing exist in the city, documenting it, and allowing curiosity to spike.

“There’s something exciting about creating a piece of advertising that, at least for a moment, doesn’t feel like advertising at all,” note Lauren and Cara.

Given how much fun they had making one giant hairball, the team decided they needed to make more. This is when they began thinking about the traditional influencer gift box and how even that part of the campaign could feel like it belonged in the world of Tumblehair.

So instead of sending a traditional PR package, Uncommon created mini Tumblehairs, bringing about one of the more unusual unboxing experiences we might have seen.

And this wasn’t the only quirk of the project. “We also employed one Etsy witch to cast a spell for good weather for the Tumblehair’s debut,” Lauren and Cara reveal.

When the pair look back on the success of bringing the project to life, they are quick to thank the brand and production partners for being “crazy enough to say yes to this… An idea only happens when you have a client partner and a huge team of incredibly talented people who are willing to embrace something that sounds slightly impossible on paper, and figure out how to make it happen.”