Nils Leonard explains how painstaking craft turned a collection of annoying buzzwords into a parody of the periodic table, a campaign that’s now won design and advertising’s biggest award.
It’s difficult to think of a snappy phrase that’s ever summed up a cultural phenomenon as neatly as “AI slop”. You don’t need to be technical to immediately grasp its meaning. We’ve all seen it, read it, maybe even listened to it. We all instinctively know when we’ve encountered it.
But it’s worth remembering that AI didn’t invent slop on its own. Unfortunately, our world was already dripping in human slop, and the beauty industry was one of the prime offenders.
Personally, I’ve got nothing against the beauty industry. I know a number of good people who work there, and its products generally make people happy and give them a sense of control over how they present themselves to the world. I’ve even drawn an income from it myself, in another life when I worked on high street women’s magazines. But even its biggest adherents would have to admit: the beauty industry has long had a slop problem when it comes to its copywriting.
Look at a beauty product blurb from 2016, and it feels uncannily like something written by ChatGPT in 2026. On the one hand, it sounds impressive and well-written on the surface. But if you start to analyse it closely, it turns out to be abject nonsense.
The good people at Uncommon, working with skincare brand The Ordinary, had been thinking about this very issue. Their response was simple yet brilliant. And it’s just won them a coveted D&AD Black Pencil. I chatted to co-founder Nils Leonard to learn more.
A dream client
The Ordinary is, ironically, no ordinary beauty brand, but one founded specifically to turn industry norms on their head. For Nils, that’s made it a dream client to work with. “You’re not working out how to nicely sell a block of cheese,” he enthuses. “You’re constantly looking at a category that really does need a poke in the eye.”
Uncommon had already worked on a number of campaigns with The Ordinary, so how did this one come about? “We just started talking about all these made-up words, like elixir and age-defying,” remembers Nils. “Age-defying is a literal lie. We started to pull at that thread, and we started wondering: how many of these words are there? We were just pissing ourselves laughing, because we kept coming up with more.”
So what to do with them? “We said to ourselves: what if there was a system that we could use to host them all, and then just pop each one and talk about the realities of each one?” The idea of doing a parody around the periodic table felt perfect, because The Ordinary’s whole identity is rooted in science.
Along with the empty buzzwords Uncommon uncovered, The Ordinary’s team added plenty of their own, and the brand worked with scientists to check that each term definitely had no scientific or regulated basis.
For the final table, they settled on 49, ranging from “Flawless” to “Crushed Diamonds”. Nils’ personal favourite? “I’m obsessed with elixir; I think that’s such a hilarious word to use,” he laughs. “It’s kind of King Arthur, bubbling in a pot.”
Minimalist design
The design of the table itself is stark, monochrome, and highly legible, and I’d argue that restraint is what makes it work so well. Some might have been tempted to make, say, the typography more “scientific” looking. But taking a minimalist approach instead actually works better, because it helps the design get out of the way of the message.
“It’s really tempting to try and do everything with everything,” agrees Nils. “And there was definitely some scientific graphic language flying around. But we were really paranoid that people wouldn’t get it.”
The rollout was treated with the same level of thoughtful planning. Out-of-home sites showed individual elements in isolation, while others displayed the whole thing. Then there was the launch film, directed by Olivia De Camps and produced by Smuggler. Reminiscent of Apple’s classic “1984” ad, it centres around a classroom of hypnotised students chanting the Periodic Fable elements while performing viral skincare rituals such as ice rolling.
“We were trying to shock people into noticing what’s going on,” says Nils. “When we make films, we always talk about: ‘What’s the shot that someone’s going to print? What’s the bit in it that someone’s going to repeat, or pause on, or be affected by?’”
He credits both De Camps’s gift for choreography, and the client’s nerve in letting them make it in the first place. “Fair play to the client for genuinely partnering with us and trusting us on the provocation of that spot,” he says, “because that’s a pretty punchy thing to put out into the world.”
Results and reflections
Once it launched, the results spoke for themselves: an 11.8x increase in website traffic, more than 80 pieces of press coverage and a 10.4% rise in purchase intent among American women. The mainstream beauty industry, meanwhile, mostly kept its head down. “I think the game with Big Beauty is that they just want to be quiet and carry on,” says Nils. “If I’m really honest, what I’ve seen more is parts of the beauty industry starting to steal from The Ordinary’s playbook.”
And here’s where we come full circle: one brand even made its own AI-generated version of the Periodic Fable! “It was really bad,” he grimaces. AI slop parodying a campaign about pre-AI slop, using slop? You couldn’t make it up.
And that, in a nutshell, sums up why these campaigns matter. As Nils puts it: “In a world of AI and hacks and shortcuts, [real] work is sexy and attractive. When you see brands or people that have clearly taken the time and made the endeavour to make something like that, people want to reward it with attention.”
That attention has now brought Uncommon a D&AD Black Pencil, and Nils doesn’t hide that he’s on cloud nine about the fact. “D&AD in my mind is the definitive award,” he smiles. “Candidly, it’s the hardest one to win. So I’m genuinely, personally, really chuffed.”
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