For most of its history, Old Spice was the aftershave in your grandfather’s medicine cabinet. By the 2000s, owner Procter & Gamble wanted it to sell body wash to young men who had grown up with trendier brands. In 2006 it moved the account from Saatchi & Saatchi to Wieden+Kennedy, the Portland agency behind Nike’s “Just Do It.”
Talking to the right person
The ad’s opening line gave away its strategy. Instead of speaking to men, it spoke to the women who often bought body wash for them. Actor Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL player, stands in a bathroom wrapped in a towel, looks straight into the camera and suggests that while your man may not look like him, he could at least smell like him.
What followed was 30 seconds of absurd, rapid-fire confidence. The bathroom splits apart to reveal Mustafa on a boat; he holds out a hand full of tickets that turn into diamonds; he ends up, improbably, on a horse. “I’m on a horse,” he announces.
One take
The ad was created at Wieden+Kennedy by Craig Allen and Jason Bagley, with Eric Kallman, and directed by Tom Kuntz. Its trick was that it all happened in a single, uninterrupted shot, with Mustafa keeping deadpan eye contact the whole way through.
Almost everything was done for real. A crane lifted the bathroom set away from above; a crew member dropped a pre-formed shirt over Mustafa’s head; a cart carried him from the boat set onto the back of the horse. The only notable computer effect was a separately shot hand overlaid for the diamond sequence. The creators said the take required three days of shooting and many failed attempts.
Timing the launch
Old Spice did not buy a Super Bowl slot. Instead, it released the ad online on February 4, 2010, days before Super Bowl XLIV, and put it on TV four days later, during American Idol, Lost and coverage of the Winter Olympics, to catch the wave of interest in advertising that follows the big game.
It spread fast. By the end of June 2010 it had been viewed online more than 11 million times, and Mustafa was invited onto talk shows including The Oprah Winfrey Show.
The response campaign
In July 2010 Wieden+Kennedy took the character further, filming a rapid series of short follow-up videos with Mustafa. At one point in mid-July, videos from the series accounted for eight of the top eleven most popular videos on YouTube, an early and much-studied example of a brand reacting to its audience in near real time.
The honors followed: the Grand Prix for film at the Cannes Lions festival in June 2010, and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial in July.
Why it worked
- It changed who the brand was for. Talking to women made the product a gift and a joke they were in on.
- It made the brand’s age a joke. Old Spice’s old-fashioned masculinity became parody, and parody made it cool.
- The one-take craft rewarded rewatching. People watched again to figure out how it was done, and shared it to show friends.
- It kept the conversation going. The follow-up videos turned one viral hit into a running event.
Mustafa has returned in Old Spice ads periodically since, and even revived the character in a later crossover ad for Hulu, a sign of how strongly one 30-second spot defined a brand.