Educating college guys on the benefits of personal grooming.
To keep Axe top of mind with college guys, we needed to show up where they were. And with authentic content that didn’t feel like traditional, heavy handed marketing.
To start we created a multi-year, multi-campus tour of the most epic college parties. Ever. For the “One Night Only” series we tapped the industry's most notorious party-starters, Diplo & Girltalk, to host a series of all night ragers on campuses across the country, connecting Axe with music - an important brand pillar.
With no advance tickets, the location was shared via social as we arrived in the first town. We created such a mass hysteria of coeds that the cops showed up to shut us down. In multiple cities.
And we revived an old brand icon, Quinn, the world’s most interesting mannequin, creating content with Funny or Die and a campus focused campaign to school freshly inaugurated college guys on essential hair care tips.
But it wasn’t until we brought Quinn on a cross-country tailgate tour of college footballs' top rivalry match-ups that he achieved cult status. Throughout the fall Quinn popped up everywhere from stadium jumbotrons and sidelines, to ESPN’s College GameDay and even crowd surfing in the stands.
Then we broadened our focus, looking beyond campus, to make a big splash during the summer movie season.
We started with a product placement deal in Seth McFarlane’s NSFW directorial debut, Ted. Then we expanded to a fully integrated campaign, with videos that featured the film’s animated title character and were directed by McFarlane, digital takeovers, in-theater activations and content partnerships with IGN, MTV, Spike TV and Comic Con.
The campaign garnered over 1 billion impressions in just two weeks and spiked summer sales. And it is one of the brand’s largest partnerships to date.