Old Spice Campaign Smelling Better

Here at The Ad Contrarian world headquarters, we try to stay as far away from "Rate-A-Record" as possible.

If you want to know what some blognozzle (thank you, George) thinks about some ad, there are about a trillion blogs for that. I don't know what the hell this blog is about, but it definitely isn't about that.

Nonetheless, last week, in the course of writing about some results I saw concerning the Old Spice Red Zone After Hours Body Wash campaign with the-guy-who-looks-remarkably-like-me, I commented that I thought the whole campaign was very good and I expected it to be successful.

This despite the fact that several online sources (Yahoo, BNET, Brandweek) were quoting a report by SymphonyIRI that claimed sales of the product had dropped 7% in the past year.

In advertising-and-marketing land we are fed so much bullshit data, after a while you start to get a feel for what sounds right and what sounds fishy. This figure definitely sounded fishy to me.

In the interim, several loyal ad contras have connected me to numbers disputing the numbers reported by Brandweek.

• According to PR Week sales of the product increased over 100% last month.

• A piece in Forbes.com uses the same SymphonyIRI study to show that sales were up 7.9% from the previous year.

At this time, there is no way to know which numbers are real and which are not. However, the -7% number still sounds fishy to me.

Thanks to Parc, Howard and Ken for connecting me to these articles.