ERHA AcneAct feat. Neona Ayu
Acne campaigns have a tendency to over-explain themselves. Clinical white backgrounds, serious expressions, the product held up like evidence in a trial. ERHA AcneAct wanted none of that. The brief was to make dermatological trust feel light, current, and completely unbothered, and the person carrying that tone was Neona Ayu.
Neona brought exactly the energy the concept needed. Young, expressive, unapologetically Gen Z, she's built a public image around being comfortable in her own skin, which made her the right face for a brand trying to say the same thing without sounding like a pamphlet. My job was to translate that energy into two very different deliverables: one tightly composed key visual, and a sprawling library of supporting shots built for the churn of digital advertising.
The key visual was the anchor. Multiple close-up frames, fresh and natural, each one built to sit inside a layout dominated by ERHA's signature blue and white. Nothing overly staged, nothing overly clinical. Neona laughing with her eyes closed, product held casually rather than presented. That looseness is harder to fake than it looks. Close-up beauty work has a way of tipping into stiffness the moment someone thinks about the camera too much, so a lot of the direction was about getting her to forget it was there.
The supporting shots were where the real range came out. We planned each pose across multiple angles and focal lengths, high shots that read almost like an elevated selfie, low angles pulled straight from fashion photography to add movement and edge. It's a technique built for volume and flexibility. Digital ads live and die by iteration, so having a wide stock of frames per pose meant the team downstream could pick whichever variation fit whichever placement, without needing a reshoot for every format.
What made the day work was the constant shift in tone within a single throughline. One frame needed a big, toothy laugh. The next needed something quieter, more knowing, a wink at the camera rather than a shout. Threading all of it back to the same source, an active, cheerful, self-assured teenager who happens to also care about her skin, is what kept the whole library feeling cohesive instead of scattered.
By the end, what we had wasn't just a campaign asset. It was a fairly accurate portrait of what skincare confidence looks like for a generation that doesn't want to be lectured about it.
rayogo Yoedo
Photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta.