Old Spice 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' Teardown

In 2010, Old Spice was a brand your grandfather used. Wieden+Kennedy was given one job: make it relevant to the woman doing the household shopping, without losing the men who already bought it.

The internal target was a 15% lift in body wash sales. By the end of that July, sales were up 125% year on year. By the end of 2010, Old Spice was the number one selling brand of men’s body wash in the United States.

The film gets the credit. The thing that actually did it came after.

What they actually did

The film starred Isaiah Mustafa, shirtless, delivering a rapid-fire monologue directly to camera in one apparently unbroken take, moving through a bathroom, a boat, and a horse in the span of a single sentence. It wasn’t aimed at men buying body wash. It was aimed at the women in the room deciding which body wash their household would buy, and it said so almost openly.

The launch is worth getting right, because it’s misremembered constantly. This was not a Super Bowl ad. It went online on February 4, 2010, three days before Super Bowl XLIV, and reached television on February 8, the day after the game. Wieden+Kennedy let the internet build the buzz, then landed on TV while the entire country was still in the habit of talking about advertising. They captured the attention of a Super Bowl slot without buying one.

The bigger move came after that. When the film took off, W+K didn’t stop at the :30. Over roughly two and a half days, the team scripted, filmed, and posted 186 personalised video responses, Mustafa answering real questions from fans, celebrities, and competitors on Twitter and Facebook, shot on the same set and in character throughout.

The scale of the response is easy to underrate. On the second day, the Old Spice channel held eight of the eleven most popular videos on the web. By day three the campaign had passed 20 million views, and that figure doubled inside a week. As of mid-2010 it was the number one all-time most-viewed branded channel on YouTube, and the number two most-subscribed.

Why it worked

1. It knew exactly who it was actually talking to

Old Spice didn’t retarget its existing buyer. It identified the real decision-maker in the household and built a campaign for her, while giving the existing male buyer enough self-aware humor that he didn’t feel excluded. Knowing who actually makes the purchase decision is not the same question as who uses the product, and confusing the two is one of the most common strategic errors in advertising.

2. The format was built to be interrupted and answered

A broadcast spot has one shot at attention. The response campaign turned that into a two-way conversation happening in near real time, which is a fundamentally different kind of attention: the audience wasn’t watching an ad, it was watching a person react to them specifically. That’s a much harder thing to scroll past.

3. The execution never broke character

Absurd as the scripts got, the tone, the delivery, and the confidence never wavered across 186 responses written and shot in a couple of days. Consistency of voice under volume and speed is a production skill, not just a creative one, and it’s the part most brands underestimate when they try to copy the format.

4. The response was a production problem, not a social media one

This is the part that gets copied badly. Brands saw “reply to customers with videos” and staffed it to a community manager with a phone.

What actually happened was a film crew, a set, a writing room and talent held in one place for three days, all set up in advance, on the bet that the film would land. The speed came from having the entire production apparatus already assembled and waiting. Real-time marketing is not an improvisation skill. It is a logistics one.

That distinction matters for any brand with a smaller budget, because the transferable part is not the crew size. It is the decision to plan the follow-up before you know whether you will need it, and to keep the capacity to make more while attention is still there.

What it teaches any brand

A single great ad can move a target. A great ad plus the operational speed to keep the conversation going while it is hot can move an entire category position. Most brands have the first instinct. Almost none build the production capacity for the second, and that is usually where the actual advantage lives.

The practical version, at any budget:

• Decide who the ad is for before you decide what it says. The user and the buyer are frequently different people. Old Spice’s entire strategy is one sentence long and it is this one.
• Book the follow-up capacity, not just the shoot. If the work lands and you have nothing ready to post for six weeks, the moment passes. Planning a shoot to yield weeks of material rather than one hero cut is the low-budget version of the same idea.
• Protect the voice under volume. The reason 186 videos worked is that all 186 sounded like the same character. Volume without a locked tone reads as noise, which is the failure mode of most brand accounts posting daily.

Old Spice also makes a useful contrast with Nike’s “Dream Crazy”. Nike won by taking a position some people would hate. Old Spice won by being funny enough that nobody had to take a side. Both are sharp points of view. Neither is the safe middle, which is the only genuinely losing option.

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