Barbasol shaving cream, sold by Perio Inc., is to begin a cheeky campaign on Monday that carries the theme “Shave like a man.” The campaign includes commercials on television and radio; advertisements online; the Barbasol Web site, barbasol.com; promotional T-shirts with sayings that include “It’s like America on your face”; and a presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
In fact, behavior on social media is among the subjects that the campaign tackles. To make the message seem less scolding or preachy, the TV commercials take an offbeat tack: manly archetypes of the past — a pioneer on the Oregon Trail in 1854, a baseball player in 1920, a G.I. fighting in 1944 — talk directly to their current-day male descendants.
The commercial featuring the soldier begins with the actor speaking to the camera. “Oh, hey, buddy, your great-granddad here,” he says. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of busy here fighting for your freedom in the Second World War.
“But now, you’re using that freedom to hurl insults at celebrities on Twitter?” he says. “Listen, hashtag, if you’re not going to fight like a man, at least shave like a man.”
The spot ends with the soldier barking, “And stop L.O.L.’ing everything.” The other television commercials mock 21st-century habits like channel-surfing and juice cleanses.
The ads are to run on cable channels with large male audiences, like AMC, the Big Ten Network, CBS Sports, ESPN, the MLB Network and Spike.
The campaign is the first work for Barbasol by its new creative agency, GSDM in Austin, Tex., part of the Omnicom Group. Plans call for ad spending to be increased significantly from recent years, when Barbasol ran an earnest campaign that carried the theme “Close shave America.”
Barbasol is not alone in using a wry, wink-wink tone to comment on the state of modern man in a nonconfrontational way.
Other companies taking a similar approach include Brut, with a campaign carrying the theme “Let your man out,” and Old Spice, with ads that entreat the target audience to “Smell like a man, man.”
It is no coincidence that Brut, Old Spice and Barbasol are all venerable brands that want to sharpen their appeal to younger men while at the same time holding on to current customers.
“We have such a good, core group of older, loyal fans, and we didn’t want to alienate them,” said Ken Waldron, vice president for advertising at Perio Inc. in Columbus, Ohio.
The device of the “ancestors” speaking to viewers “plays into our heritage and works for the older generation,” he said, and the humor of the improbable intergenerational advice appeals to men in their 20s and 30s.
Many younger consumers prefer advertising aimed at them to be humorous, and are more likely to “like” funny ads on social media and share them with friends, Mr. Waldron said.
“But humor is hard to do,” he said — and that is one of the reasons Perio chose to work with GSDM. Mr. Waldron cited the agency’s work for a longtime client, Southwest Airlines, whose campaigns carry lighthearted themes like “Wanna get away?” and “You are now free to move about the country.”
Duff Stewart, chief executive at GSDM, said the agency’s efforts for Barbasol began with this question: “How do you take a historic brand, with all that heritage, and make it relevant today?”
“There’s a nostalgia for the traditional concept of manhood,” Mr. Stewart said, and a desire for “getting back to what’s real.”
But if the ads had expressed those ideas in an overly serious manner, he said, some people might have found them antagonistic.
Instead, said Jake Camozzi, creative director at GSDM, the agency sought “a unique way to poke a little fun at the cultural trends that are happening today,” without seeming to mock viewers or make them the “butt of the joke.”
The goal was to produce something that men would respond to by saying, “It has a little bit of irreverence to it, but it’s the truth,” Mr. Camozzi said.
Thus was born what Mr. Camozzi called the hook of the campaign: “the guy from the past telling you to shape up.”
“It came from a familial truth,” he said, likening the discussion to “an uncle at the table talking to the younger generation” — in a good-natured manner, not scolding.
Barbasol is also “a brand with humor in its heritage,” Mr. Camozzi said. For instance, a vintage print ad with a photograph of a beaming bald man carried the headline, “I like Barbasol so well I shave all over.”
The primary competitors for Barbasol are Edge, sold by Energizer Holdings, and various Gillette products, sold by Procter Gamble, including Gillette Foamy, Gillette Fusion ProGlide and Gillette Series.
Perio spent $3.7 million to advertise Barbasol in major media in 2011, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, compared with $2.7 million in 2010 and $2.9 million in 2009. The total for the first nine months of last year was $2 million.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/business/media/from-barbasol-shaving-advice-across-the-generations.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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