Our goal was to create awareness of Old Spice’s new scent, Captain, and position ourselves within the world of premium fragrance. Given our humorous voice, we saw an opportunity to show up in a funny, surprising way and break the conventions seen within this category.

Old Spice capitalized on an insight that scent-strip ads don’t allow for an experience of what wearing a fragrance could feel like. We attacked this head-on by creating a scented paper blazer that allows consumers to not only test drive our new scent but also feel what life could be like if you were able to wear that scent.

We subverted the bizarro world of scent-strip advertising and made it our own. This underscored our message that you don’t have to always spend a lot of money to smell great, and that every man can step up his scent game with Old Spice Captain.

With the goal of creating buzz about Captain, we leveraged tentpoles that contextualized the humor of this execution. Launching with a Highsnobiety partnership, we leveraged their authority in fashion and culture to amplify our execution through two editorial pieces and an influencer program. The editorial launched around New York Fashion Week, featuring popular rap duo Ayo & Teo modeling the blazers. After, Highsnobiety identified influencers known for their fashion credibility to create content that spotlighted the print.

We then partnered with GQ to produce 800 custom issues of their annual Style Bible that contained this execution. We sent 22 GQ Insiders and top subscribers this issue too. Lastly, we supplemented paid efforts to work with two GQ Insiders to create content distributed across their ecosystem.

Our paid elements generated immense awareness outside of GQ or Highsnobiety readers, achieving buzz and conversation around our new fragrance, Captain.

Our paper blazers execution gained over 14.2MM impressions and 15K+ likes on social as well as energetic press pickup! This was one of a few targeted efforts that helped to drive significant growth of Old Spice Red Collection, and specifically our Captain APDO and PCC products. Red Collection is currently the fastest-growing collection in the Old Spice portfolio and has seen 54% YOY growth through the first 60 days on shelf. It continues to lead the way as a hero collection and scent for the Old Spice megabrand.