Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like": How Isaiah Mustafa Saved a Dying Brand

Published June 5, 2026

Old Spice was a brand for grandfathers until Isaiah Mustafa stood on a boat and changed everything.

The most important thing Wieden+Kennedy figured out about Old Spice had nothing to do with smell. It was a shopping observation: women buy roughly half of all men’s body wash. They’re standing in the aisle, looking at bottles. They’re the audience. So why was every men’s grooming ad talking to men?

That one insight, followed to its logical conclusion, produced one of the most effective campaigns of the 2010s.

The Context

By the late 2000s, Old Spice was in trouble. The brand, originally launched in 1937, had become cultural shorthand for an older, less desirable masculinity. If you said “Old Spice” in a focus group, people thought of their grandfathers. Axe had swooped into the men’s grooming category with a campaign that was explicit and aspirational in a very specific direction, and younger male consumers were buying it. Old Spice was losing market share to a competitor that had correctly identified the same demographic Procter & Gamble needed to win back.

P&G turned to Wieden+Kennedy Portland, who did what great agencies do: they interrogated the actual purchase behavior rather than the assumed one. The brief that emerged wasn’t “convince young men to buy Old Spice.” It was closer to “convince the people who buy men’s grooming products that Old Spice is the right choice.” Those are different problems, and they produce different creative solutions.

The Campaign

The spot that aired during the 2010 Super Bowl opens with Isaiah Mustafa, shirtless, standing in a bathroom, addressing the camera directly: “Hello, ladies.” He establishes that he’s talking to women watching with their man, or watching without their man. He tells them to look at their man. Back at him. Back at their man. Their man doesn’t smell like him, but he could, if he used Old Spice.

Then, without a cut, the bathroom becomes a boat. He’s holding tickets. The tickets become diamonds. He’s on a horse. The scene changes happened live, using practical effects, set construction, and camera tricks — no CGI. The entire spot was filmed in one continuous take, which sounds like a technical stunt but was actually a deliberate creative choice: the seamless absurdity of the transitions was funnier than anything a cut could have achieved.

Mustafa delivered the whole thing in a voice that was somehow simultaneously romantic, self-aware, and preposterous. He wasn’t playing a macho man who believed his own mythology. He was playing a man who understood the mythology well enough to send it up while also embodying it. That distinction is why the casting worked so completely.

The spot aired during the Super Bowl. Within 24 hours it was the most-watched ad on YouTube. The campaign had arrived.

But the real creative breakthrough came next. Wieden+Kennedy and Old Spice designed a follow-up social campaign that, in 2010, was genuinely unprecedented. Mustafa sat in a set that looked like a bathroom and recorded personalized video responses to fans, journalists, and celebrities who had mentioned Old Spice on Twitter and Reddit. Over two days, the team produced 186 individual videos. Alyssa Milano got one. Ellen DeGeneres got one. Reddit threads got them. The videos were filmed, edited, and uploaded in real time, sometimes within an hour of a tweet.

This was not a chatbot. It wasn’t a template with a name dropped in. Mustafa was actually responding to specific things people had actually said, in character, with the same absurdist energy as the original spot. Nothing like it had been done at that scale and speed.

Why It Worked

Three things, working together.

The first is the insight. Talking to women through an ad ostensibly about men’s body wash was counterintuitive enough to create genuine surprise, but the logic was sound. Women recognized themselves in the ad. They laughed, and then they noticed that the joke had actually addressed them, which is rare in a category that usually pretends they don’t exist.

The second is Mustafa himself. Casting determines whether an idea lives or dies at the execution stage, and this casting was perfect. He played the absurdity completely straight, which is the only way to play absurdity. If he had winked at the camera or let any self-consciousness creep into the performance, the whole thing would have collapsed into a sketch. Instead he treated every line as though it were the most reasonable thing anyone had ever said, which made it far funnier.

The third is the social response campaign, which transformed a one-way ad into a two-way cultural event. In early 2010, social media was still establishing its relationship with brand communication. Most brands were posting announcements. Old Spice was having actual conversations, in character, with real people, in real time. The novelty factor alone drove enormous earned media. But the execution was also genuinely good — funny, specific, human — so people shared it because they wanted to, not just because it was unexpected.

The Results

The campaign’s commercial impact was significant and fast. Old Spice body wash sales more than doubled in the months following the Super Bowl spot. By mid-2010, Old Spice had become the top-selling men’s body wash brand in the United States, overtaking Axe after years of losing ground. The turnaround was directly attributed to the campaign.

The 186-video social response campaign generated tens of millions of views on its own, with almost no paid media behind it. Major publications covered it as a news story, not an advertising story. The response campaign demonstrated, for the first time at scale, that a brand could participate in social media as a genuine creative entity rather than a promotional megaphone.

The campaign won the Grand Prix at Cannes. It became a required case study in advertising education. And it fundamentally changed the way brands thought about integrating social media with broadcast advertising.

The Lesson for Today’s Marketers

The obvious lesson is “find the unexpected insight about who your actual customer is.” That’s real, and worth taking seriously. Understanding purchase behavior rather than assumed demographic identity is undervalued in most brand strategy processes.

But the less-discussed lesson is about the social extension. The follow-up response campaign worked because it was actually good. The team had the resources and creative talent to produce 186 distinct, funny, specific pieces of content in 48 hours. That’s not a social strategy in the abstract; that’s a production commitment and a creative judgment call about quality over quantity.

The brands that tried to imitate this campaign treated the format as the formula. They set up real-time social rooms. They responded to tweets in character. What they couldn’t replicate was the casting, the writing, and the decision to respond only when they had something genuinely worth saying. Without those elements, real-time social content is just noise at speed.

The Old Spice campaign remains a masterclass in following a single sharp insight all the way through, from creative brief to Super Bowl spot to Reddit thread, without losing the thread anywhere along the way.

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