Gillette Commercial & Me Too

Hello World,

A few days ago I saw a Gillette commercial that I thought was about bullying at first glance. And it was, but the topic that the commercial really focused on was the #me too movement that we all must be conscious of in a time sexual harassment and bullying is more out in the open. But grabbed my attention is that they incorporated the within the ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ campaign which has turned 30 this year.

“The Best a Man Can Get” during Super Bowl XXIII in 1989 with a BBDO campaign promoting its Atra razor line. Now we live in a different kind of America than we did in 1989. The task of communicating a brand’s message is far more complicated, as is evident in Gillette’s latest attempt to explore what its now-iconic slogan means in terms of today’s issues.

The new campaign “We Believe” created by AOR Grey New York turns the classic slogan into a question. Is this the best that we, as men, can be? The answer is of course a “No” but… It leaves the audience with a sense of hope for our society. The 90-second spot touches on a series of issues bedeviling men of all ages today like real and virtual bullying, sexual harassment and misogyny, and the persistence of gender imbalance in corporate America.

In the spot, men are in a catch-22 as they attempt to be the best they can be while still satisfying society’s ever-shifting but restrictively narrow definitions of being manly. But what surprised me the most about the spot is that in the entire 90-seconds of the commercial no product is mentioned what so ever. It’s almost like Gillette was providing a PSA rather than a advertisement pedaling its grooming products for men.

Furthermore, I believe AOR Grey New York did a great job of making the classic slogan into something appropriate for today’s issues. If the “Big Idea” was completely transformed into something that people aren’t familiar with, it might have had dire consequences for the brand.

Hey, that’s it for this week’s Wednesday blog post. Be sure to support me and this blog by shopping at BocciaMan’s Store.