The Old Spice Phenomenon

In my opinion, Old Spice's current advertising campaign is particularly effective.  The ads use fast-paced witty humor and clever exaggeration, and have become something of a cultural phenomenon.  My friends and I will sometimes quote from the commercials; one of my friends has the whistled jingle from the end of the commercial as the ringtone on his phone, and another of my friends was "the man your man could smell like" for Halloween.  I picked two of my favorite commercials from the campaign as examples for this analysis.

The first commercial, entitled "Different Scents for Different Gents," shows a man in several different outfits, each being a prototypical male personality type: an athletic skier, a polished gentleman, and a manly weight lifter.  He talks about how he likes to be different types of men, and that Old Spice has a variety of scents to fit those desires (it sounds really lame when you have to describe it academically).  Regardless, the humor and memorability of the commercial are particularly powerful in creating a likable identity for the product.  

The second commercial, called "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like," is of a similar vein, yet it is more directed at a female audience.  With many rapid changes of sets and outfits, the man in the commercial speaks to the ladies watching, describing himself as the quintessential "perfect man," and asking them to compare him to their men.  He says essentially that even though your guy isn't perfect like him, he can still smell like that kind of guy.  This commercial is clever in that it singles out a female audience explicitly, yet it seeks to persuade a male audience indirectly by trying to convince guys that they'd be more attractive to women if they used Old Spice products, too.

I think that at the core of the Old Spice advertising campaign there is a great deal of sex appeal.  While there is a good amount of appeal to men's need/want to appear/be masculine, the end result of such in the mind of the male audience is the desire to be sexually attractive to the opposite sex.  In the first commercial, this is very cleverly introduced with the "because I'm a woman" joke.  By slipping a very attractive woman in at the end, the advertiser makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to typical sex appeal in advertising, while making a memorable joke.  This very efficiently gives the commercial two different appeal associations.

The second ad is also a different treatment of sex appeal.  While there are no women in the commercial itself, the fact that they are being spoken to by the man in the commercial is enough to make the association.  Male viewers perceive that this man is attractive to women, and the desired subconscious thought is that the viewers believe if they use Old Spice, they, too will be attractive to women.  The humorous aspect of the commercial is the method by which this idea of sex appeal is conveyed.

I think the clever way in which the new Old Spice ads convey their message is very effective.  The commercials themselves are so popular it dramatically increases the popularity of the products themselves.  I know that half-subconsciously I personally began using more Old Spice products since the new TV spots.