Aaron Calloway had a problem. And the solution changed his career.
The Axe brand manager had to sell a personal hygiene product popular among women to 18-to-24 year old males -- a demographic that shied away from anything remotely "girly."
The product in question was the Axe Detailer "shower tool", a souped-up loofah with a soft side "for lather" and a rough side "for scrubbing." The name itself is reflective of how the target demographic thinks: Cars good, soft skin bad.
To make things more difficult, he had to improve upon the performance of a previous campaign to sell the Detailer that had outperformed sales goals and garnered advertising awards.
"How do you talk to a guy about personal hygiene that is not a PSA (public service announcement)? It's a challenge," said Calloway, who started working at Unilever, Axe's parent company, in August 2003. "We had to do it in an Axe kind of way."
The "Axe kind of way" turned out to be a three-minute infomercial that introduced a problem that most guys probably didn't know they had: the problem of "dirty balls." It explained the importance of "clean equipment" – whether you have "small balls" (golf balls in the commercial) or "old balls" (medicine balls).
It was released in January 2010 during the Sundance Film Festival. Shorter television and film spots started in September.
But Calloway didn't want the hygiene lessons to end there. "We need to listen to what our guys said, we monitored Facebook and YouTube comments, and then released a follow-up creative that addressed what they were saying," he said.
The follow up was a mock press conference set up to "clear up any misunderstandings" with the CYB campaign. In it, an Axe representative roundly denies that "Clean Your Balls" is anything other than a directive towards maintaining sports equipment.
Instead of skirting around the issue that women may have found the first video suggestive or offensive, the follow-up also has the rep addressing those concerns.
"Our conversation is with the guys, but we can't have it be offensive to the girls," said Calloway, who said that his marketing team is evenly divided across both genders. "Overwhelmingly, the CYB creative created positive feedback."
The Detailer had first been introduced in 2008 under a campaign called "Guywash," which conceptualized the product as a car wash for the body. The campaign increased sales of Axe shower gel by 17%, according to "Axe Detailer: The Manly Shower Tool" a case brief created by Axe Shower, Unilever and BBH for Effie® Worldwide, a New York-based marketing organization that produces the annual Effie Awards advertising awards show.
Though "Guywash" had also been successful, winning the Gold Effie award in 2009 in the new product category, CYB has had even more success. Zeta Interactive ranked the video No. 1 as the video with the most "buzz" in 2010. It also won the Cannes Gold Lion Award, a more prestigious advertising award than a Gold Effie.
A Unilever spokesperson said the company would not disclose sales figures, but the campaign was responsible for "Axe retaining the No. 1 position in the male personal care category."
"That campaign has been the pivotal moment in my marketing career," said Calloway, who has an MBA from Emory University's Goizueta School of Business and "fell into marketing" after starting as a salesperson at Atlanta-based ISP Mindspring, which merged with EarthLink in 2000. "It showed me that you have to take marketing very seriously and listen to your consumers, in this case, guys."
Whenever he meets new colleagues at Unilever, he makes sure to tell them he's responsible for the CYB campaign. He will often follow up the conversation with a link to the video and a note detailing how well the campaign did. At outside panels and conferences, he introduces himself as the person who worked on the Axe campaign.
"It's okay to talk about yourself, you don't put a billboard out, but you make sure your superiors know your contributions and you receive credit," he said.
"Many other groups will call and ask how we did it, a lot of people were learning from us." Calloway also used annual performance reviews to talk about the big wins and challenges he and his team had that year. "You make sure they know
Unilever gave Calloway and his team an internal award for the campaign.
As an additional reward, he will get to play on the world's biggest marketing stage: the Super Bowl. He will be hosting Axe's after-party there this year.
Write to Shareen Pathak
Effie® is a registered trademark of Effie Worldwide, Inc. All rights reserved.
Contributing companies to "Axe Detailer: The Manly Shower Tool" included Mindshare, Edelman Public Relations and Integrated Marketing Services.
