The Campaign Is Clean, the Stunts Fairly Dirty

NEXT month some college students will face a choice: should they jump into a mound of mashed potatoes and honey, or into a giant ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce and whipped cream?

After jumping into a giant sundae, college students in the Axe Shower Gel event will use a neon-lighted shower to clean up.

It may sound like a fraternity hazing, but the event is actually part of a new advertising campaign for Axe Shower Gel, a soap alternative made by Unilever.

After its success selling Axe body spray and deodorant, Unilever is trying to persuade more young men to use Axe in the shower. In June, the company redesigned the gel's packaging to look like a video game joystick and now it is creating what the company calls "The World's Dirtiest Film."

The actor David Spade is helping the Axe brand team compile the movie, which will be shown Nov. 14 on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on ABC and will include professional skits, film from the college campus events and videos submitted by the public, all centered on the theme of getting dirty. After the college students roll around in food, they will stroll to a shower station, where they will be filmed lathering up under nightclub-style neon lighting.

"Axe is known for its fragrance and scents, and in the shower arena, it's important to show our clean credentials," said Rob Master, marketing director for skin cleansing at Unilever.

It's not the first time that Axe has been involved in creating full-length content. In the spring of 2006, Axe worked with MTV on a one-hour show called "The Gamekillers," a reality show about dating, which has been spun into a full-season series that started in September on MTV.

And Unilever has run user-generated promotions before, most notably this year with a contest to create a commercial for Dove to be shown during the Academy Awards.

But Unilever executives say this latest campaign is a departure from earlier efforts, which centered on either user-generated content or Unilever-generated content, but not both. The new approach, which combines a number of formats, offers more variety, they said.

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Mr. Master has been working with Babs Rangaiah, Unilever's director for media and entertainment, on promotions that focus more on entertaining viewers than on delivering product messages. Unilever brands that have tried this approach include I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, Hellmann's Mayonnaise and Dove.

Mr. Rangaiah said the strategy is driven by changes the company has noticed among consumers. While older viewers do not seem to mind ads, younger people do not want commercial messages interrupting their entertainment. Thus, Unilever executives say, they are trying to integrate their brand messages with enjoyable content.

"Our approach is penetrating the culture, not just interrupting," Mr. Rangaiah said.

For example, Unilever paid ABC for Mr. Kimmel to announce the user-generated component of "The World's Dirtiest Film" on his show last week. And Unilever has been changing its approach to television commercials, running them less frequently but in more expensive slots, Mr. Rangaiah said.

The new Axe campaign includes partnerships with Facebook and CollegeHumor.com, which is showcasing the project on a Web site, www.collegehumor.com/worldsdirtiestfilm. Facebook will send out news feeds about the campaign to its male users who are 18 to 24 years old.

Unilever will award iMacs and Sony camcorders to several people, and a grand prize winner will get a trip to Los Angeles. Submissions will be judged on humor, creativity and relevance to Axe's dirty campaign; the videos cannot include nudity.

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Unilever executives say they hope that Axe fans will chat about the campaign online.

Marketers are not always able to predict, of course, whether their content will gain traction. Unilever has had some recent success with clips like the Dove "Evolution" video, in which an ordinary woman is elaborately restyled into a billboard model. The message - that our perception of beauty is distorted - was provocative enough that the video was widely circulated online and shown free on television.

"That's the holy grail," Mr. Rangaiah said, "to create that kind of content that would be compelling enough every time for viewers to initiate seeing it."

But for now, Unilever is just hoping some college students will agree to get dirty.