• by Joan Voight , April 2, 2008

Axe gets naughty with its soft-core promotion

Soft-core porn has nothing on Axe body spray for men. Unilever's Axe took the men's grooming world by storm in 2002 and almost single-handedly created a new product - body spray - by focusing on a typical young guy's fantasy: that a single whiff will arouse attractive young women who subsequently won't be able to keep their hands off of him. Exaggerated humor makes the message campy, without diluting the core message.

In the spring of 2007, as the competition for young men's grooming dollars got stiffer, Axe revamped its product packaging and launched an umbrella TV and online campaign sporting the tag "Bom Chicka Wah Wah" - '70s-porn slang for a sexual encounter. In the ads, aroused women exclaimed the phrase to young grocery clerks, waiters and other men they didn't know. But by then, the ads for Old Spice and other rivals were starting to copy Axe's frat-boy approach.

As a result, when it came time to introduce its new Vice line body spray, deodorant and shower gel, Axe sought to assert its position as an innovator.

"Our goal was to drive sales of Axe Vice products to 18-24-year-old men, to build buzz and to weave the Axe brand into the culture," says Sam Chadha, Unilever director of antiperspirants and deodorants.

The resulting buzz, as it turned out, unexpectedly spilled over from Axe on to its sibling brand Dove - and not in a good way.

To market Axe Vice, the company eschewed expensive TV ads and commissioned its agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, to create a spoofy, five-minute online video. Called "The Axe Vice Naughty to Nice Program," the film shows the antics of women being jailed for sexually abusing a guy because he smells too good and the unsuccessful efforts to rehabilitate them. Says Kevin Roddy, BBH executive creative director: "We were playing off the series Scared Straight!, in which hardened prisoners frighten at-risk young people into good behavior." But instead of focusing on the kind of sexy women in other Axe ads, "The Vice video found its humor by depicting very wholesome, farmer's-daughter type girls turning into raving maniacs due to the Axe scent," he says.

The video also includes a comically shameless pr character who hammers home the product message. "The pr guy is intended as a wink to the audience, to show the whole video is meant as a joke," Chadha says.

Written, produced and edited within six weeks, the video debuted on the Vice-branded Web site, axevice.com, in September 2007 and ran through March 2008. Initially, the Axe brand managers were worried that the video's storyline was too outrageous. But Axe's young male brand advisers reacted positively, prompting a go-ahead from senior management.

"Axe has the storytelling element right and the video reinforces the brand's provocative and contrarian personality, without constraints from TV and radio censors," says Lois Kelly, marketing consultant and author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. "The PR guy provides the self-deprecating humor that the audience loves."

To drive traffic to the site in September and October, Axe tapped Edelman for public relations, MindShare for media buying and Walton-Isaacson and GMR for event marketing. Print ads with Polaroid photos of mock mug shots of "nice girls who turned naughty" were inserted in college and military newspapers and thousands were distributed to men in bars.

A contest to win a trip to Las Vegas in October was added to the Vice site. To enter, users played a crime-scene game involving all three Vice products. Online banner ads pushed guys to play the game and enter the contest.

Axe posted the video on YouTube, and it was subsequently picked up by other networks. A customized Axe Vice skin was offered on RealNetworks and downloaded over 39,000 times.

To leverage the video beyond the computer, Axe partnered with Ad Infuse, putting ads on the Boost, Helio and Sprint mobile-phone networks from September to January. The mobile program targeted customers that online networks couldn't, offering a new level of personalization, according to Trevor Hamilton, director of national advertising sales at Ad Infuse. Banner ads showed the logo and images of a "naughty" girl at the bottom quarter of the phone's screen only if the user's profile said he was male, aged 18-24. The banner asked the member to sign up to receive five 30-second clips from the Axe video. Once the member clicked the sign-up button, he got a message that the first clip had been sent to his e-mail and he got the option to send the clip to other network members.

By mid-January the video had 24,000 views on YouTube, 9 million views overall, and the Axe Vice digital marketing effort (not including itv) delivered 275 million impressions according to Axe.

But the reach of the provocative Vice video came with a price. The work contributed to a backlash against Axe and Unilever's female-friendly Dove brand. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood launched a letter-writing campaign in October asking Unilever to end the Axe advertising, decrying the "hypocrisy inherent in Unilever's marketing Dove products by promoting 'real beauty' for girls while simultaneously advertising Axe body spray by degrading them," says Josh Golin, associate director. By mid-January about 2,600 letters were sent to Unilever with no response from the company, says Golin.

About the same time, a mashup video of Dove and Axe ads was posted on YouTube as a parody of the popular Dove "Onslaught" video, which shows the negative impact of beauty advertising on young women. The parody modified the original tag "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does" to "... before Unilever does." Created on his own time by Rye Clifton, a senior strategic planner at the Martin Agency, the parody garnered 98,000 views by January 24.

"The Axe campaign is a spoof and not meant to be taken literally," the company said in a statement about the controversy. "Unilever is a large, global company with many brands in its portfolio. Each brand's efforts is tailored to reflect the unique interests and needs of its audience," it said. The company is "not sure" if the controversy is impacting the campaign's Web traffic or product sales, Chadha says.

Axe appears to be unfazed by the hoopla. Wholesale distributors reported that Axe body spray led the men's grooming category in 2007. Nearly half of the top-10 best-selling deodorant brands for Imperial Distributors were Axe items, led by the body sprays, according to Al Jones, senior vice president of procurement at the company, which serves the eastern u.s. On the other hand, Dove may be feeling the sting. After growing 12.5 percent in 2005 and 10.1 percent last year, Dove sales were up less than 1 percent in the 52-week ending December 2, 2007, compared to 2006, according to Information Resources, Inc.

The Vice video is a key part of Axe's threefold boost in online marketing in the U.S. from $400,000 in 2006 to $1.4 million during the first 11 months of 2007, per Nielsen Online. But that's still just a drop in the bucket of its total annual u.s. ad budget of $41 million to $43 million.

Even with such a modest price tag, "the Vice video campaign fits neatly into Axe's brand strategy of over-the-top creativity aimed at a very specific audience," says marketing expert Kelly. While ads for rivals Tag and Old Spice try to be hip and comically sexy, the efforts seem "tactical and are less convincing," she says. "It looks like they are copying Axe and makes the consumer wonder what their real identities are."

"Axe's strength is that it's so well-defined in how it acts and what it can do," says Roddy. "Rather than trying to find common denominators among many [consumer groups], it lives within knowing exactly who it is."