health and beauty aids

Ludacris Sings In The Shower For Harry's


Harry’s, the direct-to-consumer shaving brand that likes to upend the way people think about manhood, is at it again, this time casting Ludacris as a kid-friendly shower-crooner.

The spot is called “A shower worth singing about,” and promotes Harry’s new body wash and bar soaps via a sweetly rapped version of the kids’ classic, “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.”  

This marks the first time the company is running advertising outside its core shave category, says Lorna Peters, vice president of marketing.

“We wanted to show, in a lighthearted way, that a shower can be transformative,” she tells Marketing Daily. “But we also wanted to get past outdated ideas in the category.”

She says men’s body wash ads typically fall into two traps. “They usually either use that 'tough man, real dirty, must get in shower’ approach, or one that shows guys wanting to do better in the bedroom. Both are condescending,” she says. “We wanted to be a little more nuanced.”
She says the idea to hire Ludacris came from a performance he gave on a local radio station, singing his version of Llama Llama Red Pajama. “I have a toddler, and it’s her favorite book,” Peters says, “so a friend sent me the clip.” The creative director on the ad, which was done in-house, had heard it, too, and they decided to approach the star with the idea of singing a kids’ book in the shower.

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She says the hope is to make men seem “a little less absurd and more relatable. And the idea is that a shower can be such a good sensorial experience that sometimes you do break out in song.”

The ad is running in digital channels, and Peters says the New York-based company will wait to see the reaction before deciding to do a follow-up. Besides studying the ad’s effect on sales of the shower products, she says it will also look to see whether it has an impact on shaving products, and is executing various tests in holdout markets.

 “Because we have a direct-to-consumer model, we can see what impact marketing has immediately,” she says. “That sometimes seduces you a little into believing that marketing is a science, but it’s not quite so cut-and-dried, and there is marketing impact that develops over time.”

In May, Harry’s, which is reported to have more than 5 million customers, generated attention with a three-minute video called “A Man Like You,” which showed a young boy trying to explain the rules of manhood to an alien.

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