Old Spice ignored its buyer and talked to the purchaser
A men’s body wash ad addressed entirely to women, shot to look like one unbroken take. The targeting decision was the idea.
“Hello, ladies.” Isaiah Mustafa, in a towel, on a boat, on a horse — the whole thing engineered to look like a single continuous shot, which is why it is still watchable fifteen years later. Wieden+Kennedy built it on one research finding: most men’s body wash is bought by women.
So the ad does not talk to men. It talks past them, to the person actually standing in the aisle, and it lets men enjoy being talked about rather than sold to. That is a harder trick than it looks — the same script aimed directly at men would read as an insult.
Why it worked
The media follow-up mattered as much as the film. The team spent two days shooting short personalised replies to people on Twitter and YouTube, in character, and pushed out around 180 of them while the campaign was still hot. The ad bought attention; the replies converted attention into a relationship.
