Sixty percent. That’s roughly how much of the world’s body wash is bought by women, even though it’s marketed almost entirely to men. Wieden+Kennedy’s creative team found that insight buried in shopping data, and it became the entire foundation for one of the most quoted ad campaigns of the century.
Old Spice, a brand most twenty-somethings associated with their grandfathers, was losing ground fast to Axe by the late 2000s. Procter & Gamble handed the problem to Wieden+Kennedy Portland, whose brief wasn’t to convince young men to buy Old Spice. It was to convince the people actually standing in the aisle choosing it.
Director Tom Kuntz shot the entire 33-second spot in one uninterrupted take, with actor Isaiah Mustafa moving through a shower, a boat, and a horse without a single visible cut. No CGI, minimal editing tricks, just choreography and a script that never took itself seriously. It aired online four days before the 2010 Super Bowl and on television that same weekend.
The follow-up is what turned a good ad into a case study. Over two and a half days, the Wieden+Kennedy team filmed nearly 190 personalized video responses to fans, journalists, and celebrities on Twitter, scripting, shooting, and posting each one within hours. It became, by most measures, the fastest-growing interactive campaign YouTube had seen at that point.
The results were not subtle. Old Spice Red Zone body wash sales were up 60 percent within three months and had doubled by July. Ad Age later ranked the campaign among the best of the 21st century, and it remains one of the few ads people can still quote a line from more than a decade later.