Gillette’s campaign ‘The Best Men Can Be’ (retrieved from the archive as one of our Contagious Classics talks) was under the microscope again…. /
Anna Neyman
The difference for me between Gillette and Axe is that Gillette’s campaign feels genuine and the Axe activation feels a bit more like ‘we became woke in our advertising because we noticed it’s trendy and profitable’. Axe doesn’t really acknowledge that they used to be a massive part of the problem (thinking of their previous, disgusting advertising, centred around sex, being ‘macho’, and objectifying women) and contributed to toxic masculinity significantly, from an advertising point of view.
Karl Marsden
Cancel culture can be a bit too black & white - they knew where the money was coming from, and the potential backlash but they did it anyway - which makes their 'change the world from the inside' thing quite believable - to me anyway - they're bright people
James Swift
For anyone who's interested, there's since been a study conducted into how people responded to this Gillette ad. It's called: When brands take a stand: the nature of consumers’ polarized reactions to social narrative videos. Has some interesting things to say. According to the authors, 'immersion' in the story is a better predictor of how people will respond to the video than political alignment etc.
