The first attempt to refresh Old Spice looks a bit sour today. Although an important part of the journey, the Bruce Campbell campaign had the irreverence but not the style and demographic insight of the work that followed. By 2006, things looked grim: Old Spice needed a better strategy and a change of agency. In this case it worked – after a while. Wieden & Kennedy Portland started by immersing themselves in the history of the brand, and its cultural rating in a way which would have won the plaudits of the cultural strategists. They spent two days combing through the archives to understand the history. The result? A strategic refocusing of Old Spice from “old” to “experienced”. We’re not your grandfather; we’re your elder brother. Or, as it was expressed, “experience is everything”. It doesn’t appear in case histories, and not many people remember the Bruce Campbell commercial which launched it. He strides around a wood-panelled library. It wasn’t his fault, but my goodness it seems laboured to me now. They were meant to communicate a sense of old-fashioned charming innuendo. And this reframing was aimed at teens and twenties consumers. But in 2009 something else happened in the marketplace which caused alarm, and I was to observe it from the other side. It became apparent that Unilever was about to launch Dove Men+Care, the male extension of its female beauty brand. In fact, we were developing a positioning around men who were comfortable in their own skin. We had a Super Bowl film about to go into production, the apex of a socially designed program built around the microsite dovemencare.com, and aimed at evoking consumers’ unsung moments of manhood. In the meantime, the client structure changed at Old Spice. P&G had acquired Gillette in 2005, and had run it as a standalone unit. But in 2009, a new male grooming unit was formed in Cincinnati, incorporating both the Gillette and P&G brands. One of the Gillette clients assigned to it was Rishi Dhingra. In the frenzied period before the anticipated Dove launch, agencies were briefed afresh. Rishi recalls that he told them, “We will give you the guardrails, but within that you have freedom”. That was a very un-P&G way of doing things, and indeed was the beginnings of an Old Spice exceptionalism which allowed it to be highly experimental, to use phrases like “ridiculously masculine” to complement the official strategy speak of “help young men navigate to the stages of manhood”. Ideation took