Thursday, March 11, 2010

Old Spice

Hello ladies...
"We're not saying this body wash will make your man smell like a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it."

Shortly after reading Aaron's post about the Miller High Life ads, my colleague Mark showed me this new Old Spice TV commercial, created by the Wieden & Kennedy agency in Portland, Oregon.

The hilariously written commercial is based on the premise that dreamy actor (and former NFLer) Isaiah Mustafa is "the man your man could smell like" (but sadly, isn't). In it, he mesmerizes you (the lady) into believing your man could smell like him, instead of like lady-soap, by being incredibly suave. Though the action moves from a bathroom to a boat to a horse on the beach in less than 30 seconds, the entire thing is cleverly shot in a single take, on real sets (no green screen or anything).

A guy from Twit.TV was so taken with the commercial that he sought out the two young bucks from the ad agency who came up with the concept. You can view the interview and find out how they did it here.

The commercial debuted during the Olympics and has since developed quite a YouTube following, and New York Daily News has written an article about it. To be honest, I'm quite chuffed that an ad campaign can still make such an impression, with the media as well as the public. That seems rare these days.

Old Spice has been riding the "old-man-ish and therefore not hip but actually the hippest" wave with their commercials for a while (see the Bruce Campbell commercial for a typical example), but they have really hit their stride with this one.

3 comments:

aaron said...

The two guys responsible for those Old Spice ads were the same people behind the terrific, surreal Skittles campaign a couple years ago. Wieden + Kennedy stole them away from TBWA/Chiat/Day in New York to head the Old Spice campaign.

Cassie said...

now i'm not doing any fact checking here, and i'm not looking at the links you posted. but, i'm pretty sure i read somewhere that the tone of this commercial was only determined after the actor selected did his reading of it.

katarina said...

I believe it, because he is amazing.

According to the interview, they used something like take 57 from the third day of shooting in the actual commercial?