Accepting Unilever's top global ad award onstage in London was thrilling. Glad I didn't know we'd already been pushed out.
Even the agencies we outmaneuvered for the win were smiling and clapping. Turns out they were also celebrating our demise.
In 2005, as one of three partners in Conductor, I accepted Unilever’s top brand communications award onstage in London from Unilever’s CEO.
We won for our 2004 AXE body spray campaign as both the most innovative creative in the world that year, and for its huge impact on the business.
A major coup for us
We were a punk start-up out of Hollywood determined to take branded entertainment into the digital age. We had secured the AXE gig—our first client—just a week after officially opening our doors in Santa Monica in January of 2004.
AXE agency retribution was swift
AXE’s global ad agency, BBH, was embarrassed and even threatened by our win. And Mindshare was seriously peeved by our lack of obeisance to their global media hegemony at Unilever.
Little did I know, up on that stage, they’d already deep-sixed any future Unilever work for us.
By 2004, AXE was on fire, and P&G was scrambling a counter-attack
After 20 years building the AXE success story in Europe and Latin America, Unilever finally launched AXE in the US in 2002.
It rocked the male grooming business, and blew past Proctor & Gamble to take the top spot in male deodorants by the fall of 2003.
P&G was not pleased.
In an uncharacteristic show of weakness that fall, however, they handed Unilever a big opening.
P&G spills the beans, and we get hired
In an attempt settle retailers’ nerves and fire up their troops, P&G announced plans to launch TAG, their entry into the newly-created horny-teen-boy grooming category, about 8 months before it hit the shelves.
This premature annunciation backfired. It gave Unilever time to mount an aggressive counter to P&G’s plans:
Defense » muffle the TAG launch and defend shelf space at retail
Offense » engage boys in an entirely new way and continue share gains
Unilever added $20mm to their 2004 budget and tapped us to come up with a branded entertainment overlay to their summer TV and print campaigns already in development.
Digital entertainment was the answer, but “social media” didn’t exist yet
Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest had yet to launch, much less Snapchat and TikTok. Facebook was brand new and ad-free, and the “web series” format had yet to be invented.
Nonetheless, we came up with a groundbreaking two-part digital storytelling solution:
Cringe alert:
This was 20 years ago,
and AXE was all about
helping teen boys “get the girl.”
This campaign would not be
appropriate or acceptable today.
We put two young comedians—Evan Mann and Gareth Reynolds—on the road “to write the playbook on how to seduce women.” Like the boys who bought AXE, they were cast as awkward innocents, mostly unsuccessful with women, and the content was G-rated.
In Las Vegas, halfway through their journey, “they learn” that AXE is actually producing a massively-multiplayer video game, Mojo Master, “using” their adventures as guinea pigs to inform the game as they traveled the country.
“Evan & Gareth” became a 150-episode “travelling reality show” just as reality TV was taking off. The web series was shot and edited from the road by our production crew, and distributed online “in real time” (in reality, with a 2-3 week lag) through our own crazy-quilt “network” of laddie-centric websites.
Here’s the teaser we shot in Unilever’s Chicago offices, with Evan (dark hair) and Gareth getting their marching orders from Kevin George, the badass brand director who had the guts to pull the trigger on this madness:
We launch Mojo Master
Towards the end of their road trip we launched our video game, produced by Wild Tangent, a next-gen team of ex-Microsoft game developers. Here’s the cover to the game CD (and no, I’m not sharing any game-play…)
Dave Madden, the Wild Tangent line producer, pulled off miracles to get the game out the door on time since the Conductor/Unilever team was naive, unrealistic, and under the gun. Other than that, piece o’ cake Dave, right?!
TAG is DOA
Proctor’s “AXE killer” was actually a dusted-off Right Guard body spray from the 1960’s called TAG. The product was second rate, the creative was worse, sales were pathetic, and AXE’s share gains continued unimpeded.
P&G sold TAG off five years later to the Michigan contract manufacturer that produced it. They dumped the brand a year later.
Back in New York, a troubling Mindshare meeting
After the London awards ceremony, I buttonholed a Unilever media exec at the after-party and arranged a meeting back New York, hoping to cook up our next entertainment gig. She agreed to the meeting, but with a weird vibe. I shrugged it off, still high on our win.
Turned out the meeting was a retribution preview.
Out of bounds, out of luck
Mindshare was already building its branded entertainment practice with the Unilever media team, and they were clearly pissed that we’d “gone rogue.”
I was informed that the Unilever/Mindshare team owned the money spigot, we’d been grossly out of bounds, and that any entertainment property going forward would have to go through them (translation: “don’t bother.”)
We couldn’t compete with “free”
We learned a month later that their solution for the following year’s entertainment campaign, now that we’d set a precedent, was more a brilliant tactic to deep-six us than an effective consumer campaign: Develop, produce and launch a cable TV show to succeed our work, at no charge to Unilever.
The program was dreadful, and canceled after one short run.
Unilever loses along with us
AXE’s growth stalled for the first time that following year, thanks to their botched attempt to deliver an “entertainment solution,” along with lousy advertising.
But it did accomplish the agencies’ key goal: Kill that upstart agency that embarrassed them the year before.
Our production model was doomed
Our subsequent work with the NHL, Nestle and others, was fast becoming an expensive Hollywood relic as social media transformed the content universe, and we couldn’t make that pivot profitably.
We closed our LA operation, re-booted as Protagonist back in New York, and built entertainment solutions for the new digital world into our full range of advertising solutions.
My Hollywood days and that crushing LA commute were happily behind me, but it was fun while it lasted.