old spice research

3. Old Spice Research Task
Research the Old Spice Advertising Campaign ‘The Man your Man Could Smell Like’
Create a presentation to show your findings
Images may be copy and pasted, but all text must be
in your own words
Points to cover
● History of the brand
● Aims of the campaign
● Dates and times of the campaign
● Use of social media
● Choose another Old Spice
campaign and summarise the
campaign
Include
embedded images and videos
Urls of sites used for research

4. Questions to answer
1. How was Old Spice traditionally advertised? Find 6 old print adverts and save them
2. What are the similarities / differences (old and new ads)?
3. How did the new campaign fit with this historical strategy?
4. Which products/companies were the main competitors and in what ways?
5. What techniques are employed in:
● The TV commercials / The print ads / The Social Media campaign
5. What social and cultural issues are raised by the campaign?
6. Who is the actor (Isaiah Mustafa) in this campaign? Why was he chosen?

5. History of the Brand
● Created by William Lightfoot Schultz in New York in 1934 when he was inspired by his
mother’s Potpourri which caused him to create a scent for woman.
● The first product, Old Spice for women was released in 1937 being followed shortly after
by Old Spice for men in 1938.
● They chose a very masculine and nautical theme for the brand choosing the Grand Turk
ship as the logo.
● In 1990 Procter & Gamble bought Old Spice and decided to target high school teenagers.
● In 2006 the agency embraced the old time ‘manly’ legacy whilst making their adverts
humorous and sexualized.
● Modern advert went viral increasing twitter followers by 2700% and getting 10.9 million
views on YouTube.

6. Aims of the Campaign
● The main aim of the campaign was to change the public’s perception that
Old Spice is an old fashioned brand that hasn’t adapted to change.
● They wanted to change their target audience to younger men aged from
13 to 34 years of age.
● They also looked to target woman through the campaign in order to get
them to encourage their partners to buy the fragrance.

7. ‘Old’ Old Spice
1953 1941

8. ‘New’ Old Spice

9. OLD VS NEW
Similarities
● Portray the perfect ‘manly’
man
● All have the products in the
advert
● Suggest what a man ‘could’
smell like
● Don’t display prices
Differences
● Modern adverts much more
colorful
● Old prints have a lot of
writing
● Modern adverts often have
actors
● Modern adverts have
slogans and use the female
audience to attract their
male customers

10. Main Competitors/ Strengths & Weaknesses of the
company
● Axe
● Right Guard
● Gillette
Strengths
-Successful brand in the global market
-Renowned for goof product quality
-Affordable
-Strong advertising
Weaknesses
-Intense competition
-Cheap substitutes undercut them
-Stereotyped as a scent for old men

11. Advertising Techniques
● Old spice uses subtle advertising through the use of humor and a more
reserved use of sexuality than its rivals Axe use
● They attempt to show there is not one specific man or woman that the
scent appeals by showing a multitude of woman than their man could
smell like the actor
● The use of direct address in the piece gives a personal feel to the advert
as though the actor is trying to address issues in peoples relationships
● It also targets a female audience in an attempt to get them to encourage
their partners to buy the scent

12. Social and Cultural Issues
● Some feel that in the modern day and age a scent cannot be tailored to
just males
● The definition of a ’perfect man’ has been widely disputed due to this
advert, as people who are not like the character feel unworthy
● Some feel that adverts have become too humorous that the brand has
lost sight of what the brand represents
● The campaign was a success but had the misstep of not sustaining
engagement with the customers after the campaign through things such
as snapchat filters

15. The Old Spice 2010 campaign
Old Spice were losing their market share and had been seen as outdated and
for old men
Set on Wieden+Kennedy to remarket Old Spice
Direct competition with Dove Superbowl campaign 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj0taJVkpVY
Proctor and Gamble’s research showed that 60% of men’s body washes were
purchased by women so Old Spice needed to attract female shoppers
Many products on the market lacked masculine credibility so Old Spice could
work on the idea of smelling like a man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

16. Media Strategy
Target audience 12-34 men and their women shoppers
Old Spice media strategy for the launch was simple: Instead of spending money on the Super Bowl, they
aimed to create Super Bowl impact building awareness around it.
1 st communication layer [SEEDING]: To start building buzz with Old Spice’s fans, “The Man Your Man Could
Smell Like” first appeared on YouTube and Facebook a few days before the big game.
2 nd communication layer [LAUNCH]: Next, search engines strategy played a key role, as Old Spice
scooped up Super Bowl-related terms to help drive traffic over Super Bowl weekend. With these tactics in
place, buzz for “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was climaxing just as the game was finishing. By the
time the spot first debuted on television—24 hours later—many people assumed that it had actually
debuted during the Super Bowl. Mission accomplished.
3 rd communication layer [ENGAGE] : Post-launch, Old Spice media strategy addressed one of the key
ingredients for success: getting both sexes to talk about the campaign.

17. Media Strategy
Activations in environments where guys and girls would be watching together (Vancouver Winter
Olympics, American Idol, cinemas during Valentine’s Day weekend) and gave them BOGOs.
Video response campaign create an interactive experience in which ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell
Like’; personally responded to his fans on the Internet in real time.
Video response campaign. 200 personal videos to online Social Media tweeters, and to some of
Twitter’s most followed people

19. Watch the spoofs of the Old Spice campaign
Spoofs make intertextual references
What is the significance of these ads?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XApxFznVafg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onZxdodEFT8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4lRXxANBjU

20. Analysing the Advert
●Aim of the print advert?
●Media language
●Representation of males
●Representation of the brand
●Psychology, which human needs is it
satisfying
●Which three utopian solutions are
encoded? (how is this achieved)?

21. Representation
●Isaiah Mustafa 37 years (2010)
●American actor and former NFL wide
receiver
●Representation of masculinity in the
commercials was a key factor in the
campaigns success
●He speaks directly to the female audience
(look at me / eye contact)
●He represents the woman’s conception of
the perfect partner
●The advert exploits and enforces images of
hegemonic masculinity (preferred model of
manliness)
●Scented adverts like beer commercials are a
manual on masculinity

23. Contexts
Social Context
•Social Anxieties
•Inequalities (gender, race,
sexuality, class)
•Conflicting Social Values
Cultural Context
•Consumerism
•Celebrity Culture
•Feminism
•Postmodernism

24. Social Context
Social Anxieties
• The athletic and muscular bodies
represent the male obsession with
their body image thus attributing a
certain body insecurity to the target
audience
Inequalities (race)
• Black Looks by bell hooks hyper-
sexuality of black bodies over white
Inequalities (sexuality)
• Importance of heterosexuality in
constructing masculinity to sell the
product to women
Inequalities (gender)
• Reinforcing a patriarchal society, a
man who uses Old Spice will take the
female viewer away, she cannot take
herself
●Out of the 12 people who were responsible for creating
the advert how many were men?

25. Cultural Context
Consumerism
• In 2013, the global mass men's
fragrance market was valued at
approximately 9.1 billion U.S. dollars
Celebrity Culture
• Capitalising on star appeal / star as
commodity
Feminism
• See previous slide Inequalities
(gender)
Postmodernism
• Isaiah Mustafa use of celebrity out of
context / new meaning / new truth
• Representation of man ‘new
man’(see next slide)
• This idea of mixing references is
referred to as bricolage (meaning
jumbled). Bricolage refers to the
process of adapting and juxtaposing
old and new texts, images, ideas or
narratives to produce whole new
meanings.

26. Postmodernism