Old Spice puts a lot of attention and care into every man's armpit. In 2021, it wanted to target social communication even more towards this specific part of the body. The challenge was how to create appealing content on Instagram, a visually-driven social media platform, about a not-so-visual and attractive part of the body, while also increasing engagement and followers in the community.

The armpit has played a significant role in human achievements, from appearing in paintings to being present in every sport. However, despite its importance, it remains an underappreciated part of the body. As a brand that prioritizes every man's armpit, Old Spice could not let this go unnoticed. That is how "THE YEAR OF THE ARMPIT" was born, a campaign that celebrated this often-overlooked body part on Instagram for an entire year through art, music, film, and even showcasing parents' armpits.

To make the armpit stand out in a visually-driven platform like Instagram, we had to find creative ways to highlight its significance, despite its perceived unattractiveness. Hence, we decided to recognize all the achievements of the armpit through illustrated digital poster every month, using Old Spice's well-known surreal humor to target specific topics. Through this campaign, we aimed to increase engagement and followers while raising awareness.

In Instagram, everything is about handsome people, good-looking food and things, fashion, legs, and nice bodies. But how could Old Spice engage with a not-so-engaging topic and a part of the body like the armpit?

We used our surreal humor and created even more surreal digital activations to keep the community curious and participative. To maintain engagement and interest, we utilized topics that were on people's minds at that time, such as the Oscars Award Show, the World Cup, and Halloween.

To compete with all the good-looking content, we created illustrated digital posters to communicate the monthly topic and the activation users needed to follow to participate in this big year of celebration.

We aimed to showcase the importance of the armpit in various contexts by using the Old Spice brand's universe and humor in every Instagram post to improve people's perception of it. Inspired by antique Spanish monthly festive posters, which illustrated intricate details of forthcoming events, we developed a visual identity with a specific color palette and structure to unify future posters while providing illustrators enough space to showcase their creativity. We established guidelines to maintain project cohesion, such as avoiding collages and 3D elements, maintaining a handmade texture, and keeping posters simple while incorporating as many details as possible, with the armpit always as the central focus.

Each poster contained inside jokes and easter eggs that our community associated with the brand. In 2022, we created twelve handcrafted digital posters, one for each month, by skilled illustrators without artificial intelligence assistance.

Reach: 15M (+102% compared to the same period of the previous year)

Total Interaction: +16M

+98% increase in content consumption

Views: +4M