Both on Old Spice's own YouTube channel. Thirty seconds, and it looks like one continuous take.
Old Spice in the late 2000s was your grandfather's aftershave, losing a body wash fight to Axe and Dove Men+Care. The obvious move in that fight is to out-man the competition: talk louder to men about being a man.
Wieden+Kennedy went and looked at who was actually standing in the aisle. Women were buying a large share of the men's body wash in American households. So the brief quietly flipped. The product is for men. The advertising is for women, about their men. That one sentence is the whole campaign, and everything mad on screen is downstream of it.
A man addresses your girlfriend directly, from a shower, to explain that he is not her man but her man could smell like him.
Isaiah Mustafa, bathrobe, towel, dead-level eye contact, delivering an absurd escalating monologue while the world reassembles itself around him. Shower, boat, horse. "I'm on a horse." It is a compliment to women and a gentle roasting of men, delivered by the most handsome possible messenger, and it lands with both.
It went online on 4 February 2010 and onto television on 8 February, running against American Idol, Lost and the Winter Olympics. It picked up around three million YouTube views in a fortnight.
Then came the part that made it a landmark. In July 2010, W+K put Mustafa back in the bathroom set with a small team of writers and had him answer the internet in real time. Three writers writing, one directing, video replies going out within ten to fifteen minutes of the question arriving. 186 films in about two and a half days, to Ellen DeGeneres, Alyssa Milano, Perez Hilton and a lot of ordinary people. Some responses were live inside an hour of the tweet that prompted them.
The stupid: sell a men's grooming product by having a shirtless stranger flirt with the buyer's partner. Then, instead of protecting a hard-won hit, dismantle the whole thing, stick the star in a bathrobe in a room with four writers, and improvise 186 unbudgeted, unapproved, un-lawyered films at internet speed for two and a half days straight.
The smart: every absurd choice is nailed to the media reality. Women buy it, so talk to women. The one-take transitions are practical and in-camera, which is what makes the joke feel like a flex rather than a render. And the response campaign was not a stunt bolted on afterwards, it was a distribution strategy: 186 tiny films aimed at people with large audiences, so the audience did the media buying. The rigour is in the speed. Ten minutes from question to publish is only possible if the character's voice is defined so tightly that four different writers can all write it without a meeting.
The steal: work out who is actually holding the wallet, then write to them instead of to the user. Half the category was shouting at men about being men. Old Spice found out women were buying it, talked to them, and made the men laugh anyway. That is a media-planning insight wearing a comedy costume, which is the most reliable trick there is.
The other thing worth taking, sixteen years on, is the response campaign's real lesson. It was not "be fast on social." It was that a character with a genuinely locked voice becomes an infinite content engine. W+K did not have a content calendar. They had a man in a towel and a rule for how he talks. Everything else came free.
Also: 5.9m views on day one of the response campaign, past 20m by day three; Facebook fans up around 800%; YouTube subscribers roughly 65,000 to 150,000; Old Spice the number one men's body wash brand in the US by the end of 2010. Straight talk: the sales figures come from P&G and the agency via the D&AD case study, not from an independent audit, and the often-quoted "107%" and "170%" numbers floating around online use different windows and baselines. Treat the direction as solid and the decimal points as marketing.
Client: Old Spice (Procter & Gamble) · Brand manager James Moorhead
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy, Portland
Creative directors: Jason Bagley, Eric Baldwin
Planner: Britton Taylor · Account director: Jess Monsey
Director: Tom Kuntz · Production: MJZ (Morton/Jankel/Zander)
Producers: David Zander, Jeff Scruton, Scott Kaplan
The man: Isaiah Mustafa
The Bagley/Baldwin credit is the one published on the response campaign; individual writer and art director credits for the original thirty vary between sources, so I have left them out rather than pick a version.
Wikipedia, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
D&AD, Old Spice response campaign case study
The Drum, World's best ads ever #4
Old Spice official channel
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: