Hasta La Creative!

From raising chickens to tackling the world’s biggest men to dancing for the nation, it seems there is nothing Von Miller can’t do. And now, he’s adding the revered title of Old Spice guy to his résumé.

Procter & Gamble today announced that the Denver Broncos linebacker and Super Bowl 50 MVP will be the face of Old Spice for the 2016 season. He will promote the brand’s Hardest Working Collection. The first creative will be here early in the season, the brand tells AdFreak. For now, you’ll just have to enjoy these two photos.

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After so many years of its signature quirky advertising, it’s tempting to think of the Old Spice work as dated. But then “Rocket Car” plays for a full house at the Cannes Lions Film awards, to the absolute delight of the crowd, and you remember that this is a campaign that stays fresh not by reinventing itself regularly—but by fully committing to its bizarre ideas and executing to perfection.

A new Old Spice campaign by Wieden + Kennedy Portland for the Old Spice Swagger line broke during the Cannes festival with a spot called “Five Year Plan.” It stars a brand new Old Spice guy, actor Thomas Beaudoin, who emerges victorious in the most anatomically freaky job interview you’ll ever see.

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Wieden + Kennedy has hacked the tagging function on Instagram to create an amusingly absurd “Choose your own adventure” social game for Old Spice, filled with robots, retro monsters and meta jokes.
 

 

You awaken in a dark cave. In the distance you see a faint light, in front of you is an open bottle of Old Spice body wash. Go toward the light—maybe it’s a way out? Grab the Old Spice? Tap image once to use tags to navigate.

A photo posted by Old Spice (@oldspice) on Jul 30, 2015 at 10:33am PDT

 
The story opens with the post above. Clicking on it reveals tags that function as the navigation, leading to a maze of newly created Instagram accounts where the story continues. Clicking on the Old Spice body wash in the first scene reveals the first of many comical dead ends, from which you have to backtrack and continue.

The game is pretty much one big joke, undermining itself at every turn and parodying the genre rather than presenting a real “adventure.” The ending, in particular, is intentionally anticlimactic, centered on an inside joke about the ad budget for the project—very much in keeping with the brand’s self-aware ethos.

Give it a spin, or click here to choose a different AdFreak story.

Old Spice is tapping into the gamer community, which clearly overlaps with its own target, with an interesting campaign on Twitch—the live social video platform for gamers—in which viewers get to control a real human being dropping in a forest for three days.

Beginning Thursday at 10 a.m. PT, visitors to twitch.tv/oldspice will use the site’s chat feature to send commands to the man to perform. Users will work together to unlock achievements or activities for Nature Man. (“Arm wrestle an obviously fake bear? Hear stories from a wise tree? Stumble across interesting and good smelling characters? The scenarios are endless—and completely up to the participating gamers,” says Wieden + Kennedy, which built the experience.)

Beyond that, well, we’ll just have to see how it unfolds.

“Old Spice is thrilled to bring an outdoor gaming experience like no other to our fans and the Twitch community,” Kate DiCarlo, communications manager for P&G beauty care, tells AdFreak. “We’re always looking for new ways to entertain and build brand loyalty with our fans, and Twitch is the perfect partner to help us reach the gaming and live streaming culture in an authentic way. Plus, with scent names like Timber, Amber and Citron, we couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate our new nature-inspired Fresher Collection.”

The stream will run from 10 a.m. to sundown PT on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

W+K Portland has brought back the popular Terry Crews for a new spot in its “Get Shaved in the Face” campaign for Old Spice electric shavers.

Unsurprisingly, things get really weird quickly, with Crews horrified to find that the long-bearded guy he just shaved is himself. Of course, there’s also a lot of screaming and explosions, because this is an Old Spice ad starting Terry Crews. When Crews wakes up from his nightmare, things actually go in an even weirder direction.

For fans of Old Spice’s distinct Crews weirdness, the spot will be a welcome return. It marks the first spot featuring Crews since the World Cup effort last June. Since the spot follows the established screaming+explosions+weirdness formula those who haven’t been a fan of “Get Shaved in the Face” in the past aren’t going to be won over by this one.

Old Spice this week unveiled “Dadsong,” its second lunatic 60-second musical via Wieden + Kennedy—the sequel to the award-winning “Momsong” from a year ago. Clearly, the music on a commercial like this isn’t just an important component—it’s the main component, around which everything revolves.

AdFreak caught up with Sara Matarazzo, owner of music company Walker, which coordinated the scoring and recording of the music, to ask how it all came together.

AdFreak: What was the brief for “Dadsong”?
Sara Matarazzo: We worked on the “Momsong” campaign, so the idea for this one was to create the second single off the “album.” The challenge was to create a track as good as the first while keeping the campaign consistent and cohesive.

Sara Matarazzo

How is “Dadsong” different from “Momsong,” creatively?
The key difference with “Dadsong” is that we introduced a new perspective to the story. We needed to juxtapose the moms’ feelings with the dads’ through the music. The main melody of “Momsong” was written in an unusually low female vocal range, which contributed to our purposefully homely performances. However, “Dadsong” utilizes a more traditional female range in order to allow the full male register to shine through. The new arrangement of voices helped accentuate that back and forth and allowed us to build the song up to a bigger climactic moment with voices hitting notes all over the pitch spectrum.

Walk us through the creative process.
We worked with Bret McKenzie and Mickey Petralia from Flight of the Conchords on board to compose the music. We have worked with Bret and Mickey on several ads over the years, so this was a nice reunion. We actually wanted to work with him on the first Old Spice spot but he was busy writing music for Muppets Most Wanted [following his Oscar-winning work on 2011’s The Muppets]. I told him, “We have the perfect campaign for you,” and he was available. Of course, he nailed it.

The process started with Bret and I going back and forth with the creatives at the agency to refine the music, melody, chords and arc. When we got to a place where the team was happy, Old Spice gave us the green light and production on the spot began in Prague with director Andreas Nilsson. Once we had rough picture, our music producer Abbey Hickman worked on [voice] casting with the agency to match our actors. Walker engineer Graeme Gibson oversaw working with our casting and creating demos to show all the possibilities and different directions our vocals could be, which helped to choose our favorite takes and piece together the elements. After the singers and musicians were selected, we went to Vancouver to direct and final record with them.

Musically, the spot feels a bit like the end of a big musical, when the entire cast does the last song. Is that something that was mentioned?
Yes, that was a reference. Mainstream musical theater nowadays is largely based off the past century of popular music (except for Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown musicals). Take Spring Awakening or Mama Mia, for instance. Both infuse contemporary rock and pop styles with dramatic content to be more relevant to the modern musical watcher … and sell more tickets. Furthermore, the most passionate songs in a musical are the numbers that bookend the acts and those songs usually utilize the entire cast. “Dadsong” is like the end of one of these musical numbers because it’s passionate, dramatic, musically modern and features a large ensemble.

Which particular musical styles or genres is the spot based on?
Classic rock ballads and operatic recitative.

How is working on a project like this different from other ads you do?
These spots are special because we are involved not just in post but from the beginning of the job and throughout the process. You collaborate on ideas that end up in the campaign. Music can be subjective and go through many mutations, but with this campaign, the song and the spot are one and the same.

As Old Spice and agency Wieden + Kennedy continue to roll out ads featuring their chronically malfunctioning spokes-bot, it’s hard to decide if they’re succumbing to one of the most tired cliches in advertising or if they’re skewering it. 

The gag, which competitor Axe spent years building its marketing around, is that using the brand’s grooming products will make any man irresistible to women. Old Spice took the trope to its logical extreme, creating a mandroid who can score a hot date even when his face is falling off or he’s crushing a woman’s ribs with the weight of his industrial endoskeleton.

In the campaign’s newest spot, the robot has made the mechanically unwise decision to lounge in a hot tub, surrounded by women so enraptured by his scent that they seem to have lost the common sense to leave a body of water that contains a sparking, error-spouting electrical device.

The campaign’s ads definitely are good for a few laughs, but their portrayal of vapid women is also a departure for the brand.

A major factor in the success of Old Spice’s already legendary “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign was that it spoke directly to women (“Hello, ladies.”) and recognized that they played a big role in household purchases like body wash and soap.

Later campaigns switched back to focusing on men, but they did so through oddly charming non-sequiturs like a screaming Terry Crews or a watermelon shower basketball. 

But now, as it strives for a bigger slice of the lucrative male grooming category, Old Spice has dropped to the lowest common denominator: Use this product, and nothing else will matter. Women will hump you.

Turning women into mindless nymphomaniacs is the epitome of sexist advertising, but with one of the world’s top agencies behind the campaign, one has to wonder if the whole thing is just a meta parody of how dumb most male-oriented advertising is. 

We asked Wieden + Kennedy whether they view the campaign as satire, though they deferred to the client:

“Much like all of our TV commercials, the new spots with the Old Spice robot illustrate the transformational powers of our products in the most ridiculous, over-the-top fashion,” says Kate DiCarlo, Procter & Gamble’s communications manager for Old Spice.

“In this case, we were looking to bring to life the concept that when you use the combination of Old Spice body wash, deodorant and shampoo, the result is a manly, irresistible freshness from head to toes–regardless of your biological composition.” 

In the end, it’s hard to get upset about an ad campaign that’s this knowingly, gloriously dumb. The gags are so well delivered and head-shakingly odd, they make other “this will make you hot” ads seem flacid by comparison.

And if that’s not a definition for satirical advertising, what is? 

Old Spice scores another goal with Terry Crews, this time for the World Cup.

The brand would like you to know it’s now available in Brazil, and it’s a good time to tell you that because there’s a rather large sporting event taking place there right now. Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Ore., cranked up its crazy machine and decided to have Crews power drill through the Earth to Brazil, where he meets his Brazilian double and congratulates him on being awesome, spontaneously creating a pineapple in the act.

Someday, they’ll just have Crews scream the whole thing; this time they settle for screaming half. Luckily, Crews’s elongated vowels work great for celebrating a sporting event where people yell “Goooooooaaaaaaal” all the time.

It's been almost a year since we've seen Terry Crews psychotically scream his way through an Old Spice sales pitch. So, to make up for lost time, we get twice the Terry in one spot. 

"Get Shaved in the Face" is the newest oddity from Wieden + Kennedy, which first tapped Crews in 2010 for a series of over-the-top spots directed by comedy duo Tim & Eric. In this installment, Crews faces the existential dilemma of whether to shave off a facial hair that appears to be his micro-clone.

While Isaiah Mustafa is still the most iconic Old Spice guy, Crews seems to be the brand's personality of choice over the long term. He's gone from advertising Odor Blocker Body Wash to shaving cream—and here he's fronting Old Spice's newest foray into grooming hardware. Thanks to a partnership with Braun, you can now buy an Old Spice Hair Clipper ($49.99), Beard & Head Trimmer ($49.99), Wet & Dry Shave & Trim ($59.99), Shaver ($69.99) and Wet & Dry Shaver ($79.99).

They're apparently the perfect devices for committing anthropomorphic follicide—you know, in case that's an issue for you.

CREDITS
Client: Old Spice
Project: "Get Shaved in the Face"

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Craig Allen, Jason Bagley
Copywriter: Andy Laugenour
Art Director: Matt Sorrell
Broadcast Producer: Jennifer Hundis
Director of Broadcast Production: Ben Grylewicz
Account Team: Georgina Gooley, Nick Pirtle, Michael Dalton, Jessica Monsey
Executive Creative Directors: Susan Hoffman, Joe Staples

Production Company: Gifted Youth
Direction, Editing, Visual Effects: Fatal Farm
Sound Mix: Charlie Keating, Joint Editorial

Attention men: Want hair-care products that turn your hair into a sentient toupee capable of the most charming antics?

No? Really, it's better that it sounds. It's great for when you're in a business meeting and some dial tone is droning on about whatever who cares, and the hot woman across the table is eyeing you hard … it will mack on your behalf without anyone noticing.

So says one of two new oddball spots from Wieden + Kennedy for Old Spice hair products, vaguely reminiscent of Axe's walking-hair-loves-headless-boobs commercial from 2012. (The director, Tom Kuntz, also has experience working with hair that has a mind of its own—going back to Skittles' "Beard.")

Another new Old Spice ad tells you that your creepy-furry head pet will also serve you exceptionally well when you're on a date at the boardwalk. Just look at the magical surprise it can pull, hands-free, out of the arcade claw.

It really is the perfect marriage of the campaign's tagline, "Hair that gets results," and the brand's classic marketing ethos—"If your grandfather hadn't worn it, you wouldn't exist."

Credits plus a print ad below.

CREDITS  
Client: Old Spice
Spots: "Meeting" and "Boardwalk"

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Craig Allen, Jason Bagley
Copywriter: Jason Kreher
Art Director: Max Stinson
Producers: Hayley Goggin, Katie Reardon
Account Team: Georgina Gooley, Liam Doherty, Nick Pirtle, Jessica Monsey, Michael Dalton
Executive Creative Directors: Susan Hoffman, Joe Staples
Head of Production: Ben Grylewicz

Production Company: MJZ
Director: Tom Kuntz
Executive Producer: Scott Howard
Line Producer: Emily Skinner
Director of Photography: Andre Chemetoff

Editorial Company: McKenzie Cutler
Editor: Gavin Cutler
Assistant Editor: Ryan Steele
Producer: Sasha Hirschfeld

Visual Effects Company: Framestore
Visual Effects Supervisor: Alex Thomas
Compositing Supervisor: Russell Dodgson
Producers: Tram Le, Claudia Lecaros
Flame: Stefan Smith, Trent Shumway
Nuke Leads: Vanessa DuQuesnay, Jonni Isaacs, J.D. Yepes
Nuke: Geoff Duquette, Jason Phua, Carl Schroter, Jack Fisher, Anthony Lyons, Katerina Arroyo, Nick Sorenson, Kenneth Quinn Brown

Music Company: Rumblefish
Producer: Mikey Ecker

Final Mix Studio: Lime Studios
Post Engineer: Loren Silber
Assistant Engineer: Patrick Navarre
Producer: Jessica Locke

Color Transfer: CO3
Artist: Stefan Sonnenfeld