Old Spice Case Study: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

Old Spice's 2010 campaign "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" made a legacy Procter & Gamble brand the number one men's body wash by speaking to the women who buy it. Wieden+Kennedy then answered fans with 186 personalized videos in two and a half days, reaching more than 40 million views in one week.

What problem did Old Spice need to solve?

Old Spice needed to win a body wash category it had entered late and was losing to newer rivals. The brand introduced body wash for men in 2003, and by 2010 total body wash sales had passed bar soap, which drew Dial, Irish Spring and Nivea into the same aisle, according to the campaign's 2011 Effie Awards entry.

Wieden+Kennedy, the Portland agency behind the work, described Old Spice in its One Show entry as a once "tired" brand. The brief was to make it culturally current without abandoning a heritage name that Procter & Gamble's brand portfolio still depended on. The reported internal sales target was a 15 percent lift in body wash.

Why did Old Spice talk to women instead of men?

Old Spice addressed women because Wieden+Kennedy's research found that women make roughly 60 percent of body wash purchases. The brand's customer and its buyer were different people, so the ad spoke to the buyer while the man in it embodied what the customer wanted to be.

Tom Kuntz directed the 33-second spot, which starred Isaiah Mustafa as "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." It appeared online on February 4, 2010 and on television on February 8, 2010, the days around Super Bowl XLIV. Agency accounts say the media buy favored settings where couples watch together, so both buyer and user saw the same joke.

How did the "Response" campaign work?

The "Response" campaign was a real-time effort in which Mustafa answered fans' social media comments with personalized YouTube videos. Wieden+Kennedy wrote and shot 186 of them in about two and a half days that July, five months after the original spot.

A proprietary media-monitoring system made the speed possible, according to the Effie entry. The team started with fans who had already commented, including Perez Hilton and Ellen DeGeneres, then pulled live questions from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg and 4chan and posted answers to YouTube as they were filmed.

The agency reported that on Day 2, Old Spice owned 8 of the 11 most popular videos online, a count it attributed to Visible Measures. By Day 3 the campaign had passed 20 million YouTube views.

What results did Old Spice report?

Old Spice reported sales growth, record video views and large gains in social following. The table lists the main figures and who reported each one.

The work won a Gold Effie in the Media Innovation category in 2011 and a Gold Pencil in Interactive at the 2011 One Show. Paine PR was listed as a contributing agency on the Effie entry, which makes it a rare case where the PR role is documented.

Why did the Old Spice campaign work?

The campaign worked because it fixed the buyer problem first and then gave people a reason to pass the joke along. Each mechanism below has a named source.

Why it works: targeting the purchaser raises conversion because the person holding the shopping list sees an ad built for her. Wieden+Kennedy's 60 percent purchase finding is the basis, and Nielsen's 60 percent unit sales rise by April 2010 shows the effect before "Response" began.

Why it works: personalized replies create shareable content that a brand cannot buy. Each video was addressed to a named commenter, so the recipient and that person's followers had a reason to share it. The Effie entry's Day 3 total of 20 million views came from that sharing, not from paid media.

Why it works: monitoring turns a viral moment into a conversation. The proprietary system let the team find the most-viewed commenters first, which gave the first videos a built-in audience before open questions arrived.

What does the Old Spice data not prove?

The data does not prove that "Response" caused the sales rise, because the 60 percent gain was already in place by April, three months before the July videos. The 80 percent figure covers premium body wash sales after "Response" launched, but the agency reported it, and no independent audit of it appears in the public record.

Views also count plays, not people, and the 8-of-11 ranking measures one moment in July 2010. Read the results as strong evidence that the original spot moved sales and that "Response" amplified attention, not as proof that real-time video drives sales by itself.

What can PR teams take from Old Spice?

PR teams can take four rules from Old Spice. Each one is a decision to make before launch.

• Build the listening system before you plan the stunt. Old Spice could answer 186 comments in two and a half days only because monitoring was already running.
• Answer the commenters who already have an audience first. Perez Hilton and Ellen DeGeneres gave the first videos reach before public questions arrived.
• Write to the person who decides the purchase. Check who buys your product, then test whether your message reaches that person.
• Report sales next to views. The Effie entry cites Nielsen unit sales alongside video counts, and that pairing is what made the case credible to judges.

For more campaigns built on the same principles, see EPR's 25 best CPG marketing campaigns, and for the agencies that serve this sector, EPR's ranking of the top CPG PR agencies for 2026. Start your next launch by naming who buys the product, then build the response system before the first ad runs.