About a week ago, some HQ cohorts and I attended a Cincinnati Ad Club event which was to feature a speech by Shelley Stevens, an account director at Wieden+Kennedy, not to mention free lunch. We arrived early and settled down in our spot, right in front: the perfect place to scope out where all the other agencies had landed tables. There was no time to gloat over our superior seats however, because right after we sat down, Shelley approached our table and introduced herself. She inquired as to our business, and told us a little bit about her projects with Procter & Gamble, lamenting the fact that she happened to visit this past winter during Cincinnati’s annual Big Crazy Snowstorm. She was super nice, and piqued my interest to see what she would be presenting (all I knew was that it was going to be deodorant-related).
After she headed off to greet other folks, we were left to our salads (can we start eating yet?), coworkerly chit-chat and silently staking out which dessert to take from the plate deliciously waiting on our table (white chocolate macadamia nut cookie, for me.)
Eventually, after some Ad Club announcements and a guy drinking a beer on stage to promote an upcoming scavenger hunt, Shelley began her presentation, and my interest in the free lunch was quickly forgotten. Her main purpose was to show us how W+K revitalized the Old Spice brand with new messaging, packaging and a kicky commercial and web campaign. The 1934 brand had been hit hard when Axe burst onto the scene, snapping up young men with outlandish promises of sex and fun, while Old Spice promised, well, oldness. I doubt I was the only one in the room who associated Old Spice with their dad and/or sailing, and the brand was suffering as a result.
W+K’s solution was not only to retain the original Old Spice brand character, but to flaunt it. The sailboat was brought back. The loopy typography returned. Commercials featured that old-timey whistled jingle. This IS your dad’s deodorant, they declared, and it is TOTALLY MANLY.
The campaign also enlisted the help of celebrities such as Will Ferrell, LL Cool J and Neil Patrick Harris to tout the benefits of choosing Old Spice over newer, ‘less authentic’ brands. The new website features videos, merch and bold, confident language that is hard to resist. The overall message of awesomeness and teaching boys how to become men worked, and now Old Spice has regained many of the young souls lost to Axe and Tag. Lesson learned? Sometimes Old is the new New.