Old Spice isn’t new to manvertising. It’s their standard game, which I’ve written about before. In fact, Old Spice is, in some ways, one of the few companies to make their message direct and clear; there’s no hiding the manvertising tactics here — they even call their ads “manmercials.”
My main point in those earlier posts was to illustrate how Old Spice was creating a market by fabricating anxiety about the need for gender differentiation, and constructing fear for men about their bodies. Their new campaign (written about recently by Jezebel) ratchets down a little bit of that fear but goes deep into manvertising territory; in fact, it might be the most prototypical example I’ve seen in quite some time, and worth another look.
In my recent Super Bowl manvertising recap, I put the Dove Men + Care commercial into a group called “The Return of Resentment” alongside the Dodge Charger ad. I stand by what I said then: “the message in it is moving toward hostility and ‘taking back’ masculinity.”
Yet, the campaign as a whole perplexes me more than almost any other product launch aimed at men in the history of this blog.
