Campaign Trail is our evaluation of a few of one of the best latest creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
For years, Manscaped’s marketing has toyed with the reality about its below-the-belt grooming products. That’s meant leaning into raunchy innuendo, whether boasting about “Big Groomed Energy,” pairing Pete Davidson with Santa Claus, tapping into post-match UFC speeches or heading to the Ball-ber Shop.
Manscaped’s latest campaign, “The Boys,” adds a cinematic flair and striking visual metaphor to its promoting by imagining male genitalia as a pair of an identical “boys” that accompany men wherever they go. The ad follows one man — with a pair of boys with unruly hair and long beards — as he walks on the beach, goes for a jog, hangs out in a hot tub and celebrates at a marriage, before he uses a Manscaped trimmer to provide them a clean-shaven look.
For Manscaped and agency Pereira O’Dell, the campaign’s central idea began life as one image of a person along with his boys on a beach. The image, which might find yourself being almost the exact same as the ultimate product, was a right away winner in the room.
“The quick you saw it, you could not help but laugh, it was so disarmingly dumb. It was the thing that caught our attention internally, immediately,” said Jason Apaliski, executive creative director at Pereira O’Dell.
“The idea got here out of one in all the largest challenges if you’re talking in regards to the groin: mainstream channels aren’t gonna allow you to show that area or show that product in motion,” the agency executive explained. “How can we showcase that in a way that is meaningful and memorable, but in addition true to not only the brand, however the audience of men? In some ways, that area is an extension of yourself.”
An inflection point
“The Boys” launched this month and features a national broadcast spot and an augmented reality (AR) lens on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. Additional elements including digital and social activations, brand partner collaborations and out-of-home installations will roll out through the yr. The campaign comes at a pivotal point for Manscaped, which has expanded beyond a major direct-to-consumer focus to grow its retail footprint.
“We began to see a necessity to alter our marketing approach,” said Manscaped CMO Marcelo Kertész. “When you are attempting to scale on performance marketing, it reaches some extent where scaling isn’t any longer efficient, You need to begin to work the highest of the funnel and make the brand a bit more front and center and produce more people in.”
Along with the shift from performance marketing to brand constructing, the omnichannel brand campaign also follows the recent launch of a latest line of its flagship Lawn Mower trimmers and the brand’s expansion this yr into Walmart. This confluence of things made it the proper time to launch a campaign that embraces what Kertész calls the brand’s “super power”: the flexibility to facilitate difficult conversations around a sensitive topic.
“This is an area that it’s essential have a way in; it’s hard to discuss with people in regards to the groin. We enterprise into hundreds of various metaphors, each verbal metaphors and visual metaphors, and in some unspecified time in the future, you think that that perhaps we exploited all the things,” the chief said.
The idea of “The Boys” serves as a Trojan horse, giving Manscaped a funny metaphor that would resonate with consumers and provides them space to embrace latest ideas and possibly change their behaviors around grooming.
“The moment we saw that one frame, I remember saying, ‘This is the only funniest frame that I’ve ever seen in my history at Manscaped.’ That’s where the campaign was sold. This has potential, this has power,” Kertész said.
The rules of the sport
For the brand and agency, the subsequent a part of the method focused on not messing up the central idea, from script development through production and launch. The team spent a complete day pondering through the principles of how the boys can be presented in the ads, from sizing to appearance to mechanics and beyond.
“We wanted it to feel as relatable as possible, to not make them characters or caricatures of themselves,” Apaliski said. “Treating it with slightly bit more of a cinematic lens added to the juxtaposition of what you were seeing… Shooting in a really serious way actually heightened the humor that got here with it.”
Apart from the humor, the way in which various boys are presented in the ad — from hairless to groomed to totally unruly — speaks to the brand’s values.
“We are very careful to not dictate a mode,” Kertész said. “If you have a look at that wedding scene, that spells that out visually, where you’ve got every pair of boys in a special style. It’s a way for us to say ‘Yes, we encourage you to care for down there… but have your individual style, have your individual personality, have your individual idea of what’s groomed for you.’”
To expand the campaign to more consumers, the trouble includes an AR filter that provides users their very own pair of boys: two mini versions of the user at hip height, populated with various grooming styles. In a separate video, brand ambassador Davidson tries out the filter.
“If these TV spots open up that conversation, the filter makes you think that twice about it,” Apaliski said. “It felt like a natural extension of the core idea of the campaign: something that might be entertaining, native to a few of these platforms and apps and highly shareable.”
Whether in the ad, the AR filter or real life, Manscaped wants its customers to think about their boys and what grooming means to them.
“It’s a mirrored image of yourself,” Apaliski added, “and you wish that to be one of the best reflection.”
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