“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was one of the first videos featured in the old spice YouTube campaign and was very popular over the internet; the campaign was produced by Wieden and Kennedy. Old spice was originally founded in 1934 by William Lightfoot Schultz and started production in 1937. Sailing ships were used as the companies trade mark and was the original marketing aid.

It’s been quite a while since the company started production and many things have changed in the marketing world; the internet for instance.  The campaign starting in in mid-July 2010 starred Isaiah Mustafa who is a former NFL player. The campaign went viral through YouTube gathering 6.7 million views in the timeframe of 24 hours and nearly 24 million after 36 hours after release.

One year later (end of July 2011) Old spice launched a new campaign similar to the original; the difference was it was based heavily to the YouTube medium after the massive success of the first. Isaiah Mustafa starred in a series of advertisements in response to people’s questions and comments received via Twitter, Facebook and other social media. The Campaign lasted a couple months and Isaiah responded to around 186 questions in video form. The marketing was done extremely well in my opinion, using Isaiah’s chiseled body and refreshing sense of humour was an amazing choice.

Behind the scene of the video “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” looks like it’s all different footage and later composited into one clip; Incredibly it’s done all in one single shot.

They built half a boat on the coastline, the bathroom was a 3 wall subset built to fit on top of the boat and was later lifted via crane. The jumper was thrown onto Isaiah, and the shell was pulled off by a string. The diamonds and the Old spice rising from the hand was shot in a different set using a fake hand that pumped out diamonds, I assume they used green screen to later composite that hand into the final footage. This was only in fact the only computer generated aspect of the commercial. The next and final stage is Isaiah being on a horse, this was done by transporting him on a cart like mechanism onto a horse waiting for him on the beach.

Wieden and Kennedy did an incredible job to produce these ads, remarkably most that were created were all done in one single shot with limited CGI.