The Old Spice advertising campaign from 2010 aimed to modernize the brand's image and attract new customers. Known as "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like", it featured actor Isaiah Mustafa addressing the camera and appealing to women. Through viral videos and an interactive social media strategy, the campaign became a major success. It helped Old Spice shift perceptions from being seen as outdated to representing contemporary masculine ideals.

1. Old Spice Advertising
OLD SPICE THROUGH THE YEARS
Superbowl Tide advert

3. Old Spice Research Task – Answer these!
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. Old Spice
1953 1941
http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/search?q=old+spice

7. 1942

21. 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Old Spice were losing their market share and had been seen as outdated and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

22. 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.

23. 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

25. 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

26. 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)?

27. 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

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

30. 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?

31. 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.

32. Postmodernism