Old Spice Gives You the Confidence to Breakup With Heather Graham

Old Spice is repackaging its traditional masculinity with a new line of ads that maintain its epic over-the-top exaggerations and quirky humor. It’s like old wine in a new bottle and like old wine, keeps getting better with age. Old Spice seems to have outdone itself in bringing out ads of excellent vintage that have drawn in considerable viewership within a few hours of being aired.

Old Spice agency, Wieden+Kennedy said that “Champion line” of deodorants, anti-perspirant, deodorants, body wash and body spray, exults the hidden winner that lies dormant in every man and “gives them the motivation and self-confidence to win in the game of life.”

The new ads celebrate the champion in you. It suggests that with the help of Old Spice, you can become the man you want to be. The campaign shows, that men can achieve, far-fetched implausible things, when inspired by the manliness of Old Spice’s smell.

In the first ad, a scrawny man is seen working out with dumbbells, whilst listening to a self-help tape. The inspiration tape tells him he has “big muscles and cool hair,” sophisticated friends and an environmentally friendly car. The ad later shows a car made completely of sand.  He is motivated and it’s visible in his changed life. He puts on muscle, his hair becomes cooler and he befriends a diverse group of friends. Life changes for the better, because he ‘believed in his smellf.’

The ad also features Heather Graham, the Drugstore Cowboy and Boogie Nights girl, who our hero, unceremoniously and rather callously dumps, as he wins a horse race, as the horse, with a jockey on his back.

The self-help idea resurfaces in the Sand Car ad, where the scrawny hero, of our first ad, now transformed into a super-stud saying, ‘Being a champion is not about overcoming adversity, it’s about romancing adversity and getting it to do, whatever you want it to do’ from the driver’s seat of his eco-friendly, made with sand, sports car.

In the third ad, a man, his left leg in a plaster cast says that following an accident, his doctor forewarned that he’d never walk again. He doesn’t walk, but flies, next to the side of a stunningly beautiful woman.

The new ads are goofy and maintain the tradition of the company’s tradition of lunacy and hyperbole. Its tagline, “Believe In Your Smellf” borders on being daft and silly but fits in nicely with the ad’s themes – yet another winner, from the stable of old Spice, that has a penchant for featuring horses.

Old Spice has come a long way, since their first online ad, ‘The man you could smell like’ featuring the smooth talking muscular Isaiah Mustafa. Since then they have come out, with one great ad after another. The new spots only add to the heritage and not diminish it in any way.