World’s Dirtiest Commercial
After writing about the preference most advertisers have for professional content versus consumer generated content yesterday, I stumbled across this new viral effort from Axe body wash that tries, with a fair amount of success, to combine the two. The goal was to create The World’s Dirtiest Film and you’re welcome to judge for yourself if they pulled it off.In a partnership with College Humor, one of the finest purveyors of high brow content on the Web, Axe invited consumers to submit videos of themselves getting dirty. The prevailing theme of the videos submitted by consumers generally involved some sort of food related gross-out or a lover’s food fight. Then the good people at Axe, with help from David Spade (so that’s where he’s been) wrap a four-minute slick commercial around the whole thing, post a trailer to YouTube and let the viral fun begin.
Yes, this is a fun campaign but what bothers me about Axe is how it fails to distinguish itself as a brand from close competitors like TAG body spray. With both brands targeting the same sex-obsessed frat boy with the same tongue-in-cheek sleaziness, how are these college-aged consumers supposed to remember which brand is supposed to get them laid? As if it wasn’t already confusing enough for these guys!
What I’d like to see is one of these brands take off in a new direction and distinguish itself. Judging by MTV and what’s been popular on the CW, why doesn’t one of these brands try to cultivate the faux-affluent image that this demographic seems to be obsessed with? I’m relatively certain that the value proposition of this product extends beyond Sigma Phi.
