The idea that a fragrance has the power to connect two people on a romantic level is, at best, fictional. You shouldn’t take any perfume ad seriously. And in the past decade, Axe had adopted a more down-to-earth tone of voice, adding more to this confusion. A change was needed. So, when trying to convey this new viewpoint to our young audience, film was the undoubted answer. We created the most over-the-top, absurd fragrance films we could think of, with documentary-like commentaries from the protagonist. Our aim was to bring back humor to Axe films.

A global brand like Axe needs to reach various markets, but attempting to appeal to everyone often results in no one feeling truly identified.

To connect with young people in the UK, we delved deep into the culture by immersing ourselves in the heart of the country. We set the story in small villages, casting locals and embracing their accents. The narrative had to reflect a style and humor that felt authentic. To replicate the campaign in different markets, we avoided dubbing or translation. Instead, we subtitled it as if it were an English series.

The story starts at a funeral of a guy in his 20s. The family and friends approach the casket to bid their last goodbyes. But every time they do so, they cannot help but sniff him: he clearly smells great, so much so that one of the girls can't resist continuing to smell him, even climbing into the coffin, unleashing chaos among all the attendees. She's fallen for him to the point of shouldering the coffin and taking it with her in her car.

At the end of the film, we see a flashback to the same morning: our guy sprayed Axe fragrance and went out onto the street, getting hit by a car, resulting in the weirdest funeral we've all seen.

Humor has historically been one of Axe's strongest assets. However, over the last decade, that message has gradually become diluted and flat. A change was necessary to regain entertainment value and to be attractive, especially for our main target: Gen Z boys.

The brand needed a campaign in line with its personality: young, irreverent, with a rule-breaking spirit. It was necessary to communicate in a simple and unequivocal way how great Axe fragrances smell.

Once the campaign aired in the UK, Firefish conducted a post-test in 2024 with both men and women, yielding positive results.

Instead of receiving a 99% positive opinion, which would indicate a lack of emotional impact, the response to the ad was split almost 50/50, with around half of the sample finding it genuinely funny, while the remainder did not.

This response was replicated among both the male and female samples, with similar levels of likes and dislikes across the two audiences.

Those who found the advert funny often considered it very amusing, believing it would stand out and be memorable."