Bigger Issues

I got to admit as a teenager my first deodorant was Axe Musk. Yeah, you can ridicule me, but imagine  a teenage boy pumped with testosteron watching the overtly sexist campaigns featuring the commercial version of paradise full of turned-on women not virgins that’s like kicking in an open door. For the multinational Unilever under the helm of Paul Polman, the sexist advertising didn’t really play well with their new purposeful strategy. The earlier strategy was out of tune. To begin with Axe probably took to hard a look at the statictics to search for a more meaningful way to connect with a new generation of teenagers, who’s hopefully more sensible than I was. Axe came up with world peace – an issue many surveys showed matters to Gen Z. And who can really be against world peace? The campaign to me at least came across as rather banal especially for a brand that normally was rather ballsy.

In 2015, they struck another and more mature cord. Something not many brands would be bold enough to face head-on. In the UK, 8 out of 10 people who kill themselves are men. It is now the single biggest killer of young guys in the UK. But few people know that fact.

The campaign “Bigger Issues” raised awareness of the issue vollaborating with the charity CALM, Axe (the brand is called Lynx in the UK) revealed all the things men are happy to talk about to highlight the one thing they’re not.

Live social listening powered a national campaign spanning social, online banners and digital billboards – with creative executions drawing upon whatever inane subject was monopolising newsfeeds at any given moment. Topics that were statistically ‘bigger’ than suicide.

Impact:

A YouGov poll showed that awareness has gone up by a massive 45% (2015). #BiggerIssues became one of the most talked about topics across the UK on november 19th and reached over 23,000,000 people. On the same day, International Men’s Day, the topic of male suicide was debated in parliament for the first time.

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