Old Spice wanted to find a completely unique way to promote and sell their new product: Old Spice Foamer. With Von Miller as their new brand mascot, the creative approach also needed to find a way to incorporate an NFL theme. In true Old Spice fashion, it also needed to speak to their target demographic of young millennials and Gen-Zers whose habitat is mostly online and spent watching YouTubers and video game streamers. Overall, the objective wasn’t just only to sell and promote the new Foamer product, it was also to cement Old Spice’s brand as the one that’s fun, zany and resonates with an online community – that’s why we decided to go big, bold and LIVE.

The creative idea came from taking a Japanese game shows and westernising it with an NFL spin – centered around superstar mascot Von Miller. We ran with that idea to the endzone and created the Foam Zone: a football stadium, made out of Old Spice foam, where 24 people compete against each other, live, on the Internet. We designed and created 6 NFL-themed obstacle courses for a live game show streaming on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch.

Viewers could affect the course of the game show by commenting with hashtags and emojis to vote on what should happen. To make things harder, they could entice crew members to tackle contestants as they attempted to cross an obstacle, or vote for contestants drop from platforms into a pit of foamy despair. Viewers were able to #makeitfoam, turning on colossal Old Spice Foamer spraying cans to unleash a deluge of foam onto contestants.

Old Spice lovers come from all walks of life, but for the new Old Spice Foamer we wanted to target the new generation of stream-loving, hyper-conversational-internet-dwellers with something they could interact with, and be entertained by. That’s why we decided to simulcast a live-stream on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. We combined this with targeted social media advertisements across these platforms in the run up to the Foam Zone to draw eyes, ears and interaction to this crazy production.

To bring the Foam Zone to life, we needed space, a lot of it. So we rented two warehouses that were big enough to house the massive sets, as well as all of the 24 contestants plus crew.

We crafted quirkily football fields, ridiculously big Old Spice Foamer cans, haze machines to create mysterious fog, and trees to make for a nice background. To really set the stage, we also produced two gigantic head sculptures for the presenters of the live event. We created an all-mighty statue for NFL player and Old Spice all-star, Von Miller, and also sculpted one for the Guard with the Golden Whistle: Foam Zone referee Mark Jensen.

The multichannel livestream resulted in 7.3 million views and 126 thousand interactions, thanks to one amazing host, three relentless commentators and over eighty live polls. During the second day, Foam Zone even became the No. 3 trending live video on YouTube. But two days of Foam Zone is obviously not enough for the internet to decide on a winner. The true Foam Zone winner will be revealed on prime-time TV during the NFL game between the Redskins and the Saints — bringing together online and analog audiences for a final showdown. Because there can be only one winner worthy of the mighty Foam Zone cup and all the bragging rights that come with it.