A brand too strong to stay in its own ad

A new commercial featuring Charmin Freshmates, the moist flushable toilet paper, opens with a shot of the product atop the tank of a commode.

Charmin Freshmates are formulated to clean you better than dry bath tissue,” says a voiceover. “And they — ”

The head of Terry Crews, the actor and former National Football League player, pops out of the box of Freshmates, as his hand, holding a can of Old Spice body spray, smashes through a wall.

“Old Spice is too powerful to stay in its own commercial!” Crews says, as the commercial closes with a shot of four Old Spice body spray scents and a slogan for the brand’s newest campaign, “Smell is power.”

Another commercial featuring Bounce dryer bars, a fabric softener that attaches inside dryers and lasts for months, begins with a woman holding a basket of clothes in the laundry room of her suburban home.

“To stop static cling, I put Bounce dryer sheets in every load of laundry,” she says. “It gives my clothes that line-dried.”

Crews crashes through the wall on a Jet Ski.

“Old Spice body spray smells so much like power,” says Crews, who is shirtless, “it sells itself in other people’s commercials!”

Crews sniffs the woman’s basket. “You smell like line-dried freshness,” he says, to which she replies, “You smell like power.”

The ads are by the Old Spice agency, Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore, and are directed by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, of “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job,” on Adult Swim. The ads will be introduced on Facebook and YouTube on Thursday and on television on February 6.

Old Spice, Bounce and Charmin are Procter & Gamble (P&G) brands, and in marketing parlance this is co-branding. But how co-branding for P&G typically works is exemplified by Febreze, the brand of scented deodorizers: some varieties of Swiffer dusting cloths and Mr Clean cleaning solution are marketed as having Febreze scents.

Here, though, Old Spice and the products co-starring in its commercials are not collaborating on any formulations — there will not, of course, be a Bounce with the scent of Old Spice.

While advertisers have done sendups of advertising genres, among them Energizer, whose drumming bunny has appeared in parodies of ads for fake products, a real brand commandeering an ad for another real brand is a first, according to P&G.

Barbara Lippert, an advertising critic for Adweek for more than two decades before joining Goodby, Silverstein & Partners last year as a popular-culture expert, could recall no precedent for the concept. She was impressed. “One commercial crashing into another commercial is really dead-on brilliant because it mimics the chaotic clutter of advertising,” Lippert said.

The approach coming from as established an advertiser as P&G, whose first national advertising campaign, for Ivory soap, ran in 1882, also struck her as noteworthy.

“This is a very meta campaign, which is amazing when you think that it came from P& G,” Lippert said.

The brand declined to reveal the cost of the campaign, which includes three other spots that feature Crews, but no other brands. Old Spice spent $45.2 million on advertising in 2010 and $31.4 million in the first nine months of 2011, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

Bounce and Charmin are both pitched to women, particularly mothers, while Old Spice ads are aimed at men on networks like ESPN.

@2012 The New York Times News Service