In all its simplicity, the idea was to demonstrate how people won’t tell you if you smell – but they will talk about you if you do. We did this by spraying potent body odour on an actor who then took a lift with unsuspecting fellow passengers. All reactions were captured with hidden cameras, of course, which provided us hilarious yet genuine material for a YouTube film with viral potential.

Before hiding cameras in a lift to capture people’s reactions, we asked Rexona scientists to engineer us an odour producing bacteria formula. It didn’t just mimic the smell, it actually produced real body odour. We then sprayed it on an attractive actor, let her loose on the unsuspecting public and documented the reactions. This simple shoot was the basis of what became the YouTube hit called Rexona Lift Experiment. On top of YouTube, we drove contextual relevance by running the film in elevator TVs in selected office buildings in Indonesia.

The social experiment has garnered over 6.9 million views, making it the most successful Unilever video to-date in Indonesia. It has 270% more views than the next best performing Rexona video. To give some context, the video got more views in a matter of months than Rexona’s biggest competitor Nivea got for their whole YouTube channel in a year. The video was so successful that a similar experiment has now been replicated in three other major markets (India, Brazil & Russia). The month the social experiment launched, Rexona had the biggest growth of market share in Indonesia in the brand’s history.