• by Karl Greenberg , October 7, 2011

The brand's Energizer Personal Care unit is running a web campaign and promotion tied to its Xtreme3 razor line, whereby people who create and upload photos of themselves shaving something or someone to "shave the world" have a chance to win $10,000, with cash and other prizes for runners-up.

The "razorbombing" effort, a play on photo bombing, in which people insert themselves into photos of important people, was put together for Schick by PR firm Edelman and involves a partnership with BuzzFeed.com. Visitors to the site can use an application on the Schick-branded homepage window to create a photo-bombed image in which they are shaving, say, the Mona Lisa. Some actual entries include someone shaving New Jersey (armpit of the nation reference implied), Jesus (that one has a "Jesus Shaves" super), and various buildings, streets and anything that looks as if it has been shaved. Alternatively, one can upload a real photo.

An entry with the highest volume of shares on Twitter, Facebook and other buzz channels wins. This week, Schick announces the winner for the campaign, which launched earlier this month.

Suma Nagaraj, brand manager for Schick Xtreme3, says the web effort supports a larger campaign for Xtreme3 Refresh, which is actually a razor with a scented handle. "We are also running experiential, social media and television for the product, which launched in July. This has really been the focus for the year, as it's a very unique offering. We did a lot of research on this and found the men like it."

Nagaraj says the campaign is web-centric and is focused on reaching younger males. "One of the things we have been doing a lot is influencer social-marketing; as the media landscape is changing, influencers have more say in purchase decisions." She explains that the deal with BuzzFeed involves an effort to find avenues based on what kinds of consumer-generated content are current. "We know consumers are skeptical about brand messaging, so we are partnering with BuzzFeed to find trends that are hot out there and put ourselves in that conversation without ambushing people with the brand name."

There's an inherently subversive quality to a lot of that content. Nagaraj says, for example, that planking is big right now. What's planking? Basically it involves lying prone, like a human plank in some location where that would either be crazy, taboo, or just outré and taking a photo of it. "So we thought about how we could come up with a photo trend with a razor and came up with razor bombing," she says. "It's a fun, cool idea for the brand."

Even though Schick has gotten some 25 million impressions thus far for the "Shave the World" campaign, Schick's problem is getting out of the shadow of a certain personal care brand owned by a certain Cincinnati-based company. "Awareness is a very big challenge," concedes Nagaraj. "We have to get the right balance to make sure we do get the brand name out there, but are not so heavy handed we turn people off."

One of the components of the "Shave the World" campaign involves Schick's sponsorship of NASCAR driver Martin Truex, Jr. who races the No. 56 Toyota for Michael Waltrip Racing. Schick signed the NASCAR sponsorship deal, which promotes Xtreme3 FitStyle Refresh in June this year.

"Thinking about who the target is, we felt there was really good fit with NASCAR," says Nagaraj. Schick has venues at certain races, but more to the point, Truex and other members of the Waltrip team made their own "Shave the World" video in which they offer their own ideas of what they would like to shave, which they are promoting via their own social channels.