The New Spice

Just when they said it couldn’t be done, possibly the oldest and daggiest brand in Procter and Gamble’s brand arsenal – Old Spice – has been reborn with a cool new commercial, which has brought new meaning to the concept of going viral.

This year at Cannes, where the advertising industry’s good and great get together to decide on the best advertisement in the world, the winner was – The Old Spice commercial.

The ad, which features below, was launched at this years’ super bowl in America and was chosen from more than 3000 entries as ‘commercial of the year’ at Cannes. To see just how deadly it is, watch it here if you haven’t seen it. Trust us, it’s good.

If you have seen the ad, you are now one of almost 20 million people who have seen the ad on You Tube alone, not to mention free to air and cable TV.

There are now three ads in this direct-to-camera style series where the actor and ex pro footballer Isiah Mustufa gently mocks the average male and makes the best of his extraordinary good looks.

What’s interesting about this commercial is that like a previous winner – the now iconic drumming Gorilla which you can see below – the product being discussed, even advertised, is a relatively loosely held concept, barely featuring in the ad at all.

Here’s the rub though – the Cadbury’s Gorilla campaign won the same award as the Old Spice campaign, but perhaps most telling for me is the fact that there was, according to the Ad Age, no significant discernable increase in Cadbury’s product following the drumming Gorilla advertisement.

While here at burningpants we suspect that the same won’t be true for Old Spice (after all it’s a supermarket impulse commodity which is easily replaceable, not something you might feel guilty about eating more of), it did however start us thinking about the latest success NAB seems to be having in the Home Loans market.

NAB, according to the latest APRA figures, has started to grow its home loan book – at a time when both CBA and Westpac have been losing market share – by about 3.5 per cent.

Perhaps NAB is convinced its new ad campaign – More Give Less Take was the driver behind this success.

Or perhaps it was the fact that NAB had the lowest standard variable rate and doesn’t charge fees – proving that if you can’t sell loans, perhaps you can give them away.

Here’s something worth noting at the end of this article; while the Cadbury Gorilla won awards, but didn’t boost the sales of chocolate particularly, this ad – for Wonderbra – which is a spoof on Cadbury didn’t win an award, but apparently did a lot for sales: