Use AXE responsibly

Axe:::Double pits to chesty

To promote its deodorant spray in an innovative, fresh way. Axe has created a downloadable iphone game, Pogo Xtreme. Players must perfect that mainstay of the morning grooming routine, the deodorant spraying motion – a move Axe dubs the ‘double pits to chesty’.

Axe’s target demographic for the campaign is 16-24 year old males, which just so happens to be the prime gaming demographic too. Pogo Xtreme plays upon young males’ interest in X-game sports like Skateboarding and BMXing, which contain bizarrely named moves such as ‘nosegrind’ and ‘fakey flipside olly’.

In its iphone game players pogo about collecting Axe deodorant cans. Once a certain number of cans have been collected, players are prompted to perform a ‘double pits to chesty’ move on the pogo stick. Sexy girl ‘affirmations’ encourage them to keep playing. Users can log scores on social networking sites such as facebook.

Pogo Xtreme is one of the first full length multi-level branded iphone games. In

conjunction with the free, downloadable game, Axe has paid for advertisements across the whole range of downloadable iphone apps.

BRAND: Axe

BRAND OWNER: Unilever

CATEGORY: Toiletries/ Cosmetics

REGION:Global

DATE: Jul 2009

AGENCY: Wild Tangent/Greystripe

MEDIA CHANNEL

AXE 2009 TV Commercials

Axe| Periodic table

Advertising Agency: Lowe/SSP3-Bogotá, Colombia
Executive Creative Director: Jose Miguel Sokoloff
Creative Directors: Margarita Olivar, Juan Carlos González
Art Director: Margarita Olivar
Copywriter: Juan Carlos González
Photographer: Esteban Sosnitsky, Zumo
Agency Producer: Sonia Llanos
Other Additional Credits: Juanita Delgado, Natalia Franco

Axe Instinct – The Power of Leather Curves

Axe Instinct, a scent introduced in 2009, is being promoted with a 3D animated television commercial featuring a woman in leather. The new Instinct has combined the fragances of cardamom, amber, and atlas cedar to produce a spicy scent of leather.

The Swedish team, Againstallodds, worked with Blacklist to produce the new commercial, beginning with the inspiration of a piece of leather and a set of print advertisements. What they came up with was the concept of a woman whose sensual movements are revealed in the rippling curves of dark leather.

Click on the image below to play the video in YouTube (HD)

Credits

The Power of Leather ad was developed at The Brooklyn Brothers, New York, and Againt All Odds, Stockholm, .

Filming was produced at Blacklist by executive producer Adina Sales,

Special effects and visual effects were produced at Milford Film, Stockholm, and Animation AB. Audio finishing was done at Audio Engine.

Music, “Moodswing”, was composed by Pedro Margues and Jean-Paul Wall and sung by Saphir Cristal Stoffels Fernandes Tavares. Sound was mixed by Carl Mandelbaum.

Behind the Scenes with Againstallodds

Q: This spot is a bit of a creative departure for you. Can you tell me about attracted you to the job?

againstallodds: To create this spot we were given a piece of leather and a print campaign and were told bring it to life. This spot is like nothing else on our reel and we were excited to create something we had not tried before. We really wanted to build on the dimensionality of the forms in the leather so that everything really moved naturally but had a enough definition and abstraction to draw people in. We were really attracted to the mixture of darkness and nakedness. It really seemed like something we wanted to see move.

Q: The texture of the leather is very detailed. Tell me a bit about how you created this look, what tools you used and if there were any challenges.

againstallodds: We began this project with a photo shoot with real actors and the leather laid out on a flat bed. We took moving references with naked models to show how the body moves and the leather reacts to different light setups. Then we edited everything together to make a rough timing. Animation and simulation followed and was a mixture of Maya nCloth and Houdini to make everything come together. The simulation was a great start and gave dimension to the leather but we really wanted to have control over some of the smaller details such as muscle and bone and they were getting lost in the simulation, so Milford lighting developed a special shader that took information from a more detailed mesh of the body and applied it to the leather simulated cloth.

Q: It’s a very sexy spot too. Can you tell me a bit about that?

againstallodds: That was something we really worked hard to keep. Doing sexy in 3d can be a tricky thing. Since everybody knows how humans move and are very sensitive to what’s not right even the most subtle movement can prove to be hard to recreate. We were very lucky to have a great photo model strip off and go through the timings and poses to block everything out so that we had great reference in the animation phase. On top of that we worked a lot with the shadows and lighting to reveal and cover sections of the body so that the silhouette and feminine curves really stood out and that the rest of the body became abstract.