For years, Manscaped's marketing has toyed with the truth about its below-the-belt grooming products. That's meant leaning into raunchy innuendo, whether boasting about "Big Groomed Energy," pairing Pete Davidson with Santa Claus, tapping into post-match UFC speeches or heading to the Ball-ber Shop.
Manscaped's latest campaign, "The Boys," adds a cinematic flair and striking visual metaphor to its advertising by imagining male genitalia as a pair of identical "boys" that accompany men wherever they go. The ad follows one man — with a pair of boys with unruly hair and long beards — as he walks on the beach, goes for a jog, hangs out in a hot tub and celebrates at a wedding, before he uses a Manscaped trimmer to give them a clean-shaven look.
For Manscaped and agency Pereira O’Dell, the campaign's central idea began life as one image of a man with his boys on a beach. The image, which would end up being almost exactly the same as the final product, was an immediate winner in the room.
"The instant you saw it, you couldn't help but laugh, it was so disarmingly dumb. It was the thing that caught our attention internally, instantly," said Jason Apaliski, executive creative director at Pereira O'Dell.
"The idea came out of one of the biggest challenges when you're talking about the groin: mainstream channels aren't going to let you show that area or show that product in action," the agency executive explained. "How can we showcase that in a way that's meaningful and memorable, but also true to not just the brand, but the audience of men? In some ways, that area is an extension of yourself."
An inflection point
"The Boys" launched this month and includes a national broadcast spot and an augmented reality lens on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. Additional elements including digital and social activations, brand partner collaborations and out-of-home installations will roll out through the year. The campaign comes at a pivotal point for Manscaped, which has expanded beyond a significant direct-to-consumer focus to grow its retail footprint.
"We started to see a need to change our marketing approach," Manscaped Chief Marketing Officer Marcelo Kertész said. "When you are trying to scale on performance marketing, it reaches a point where scaling is no longer efficient, You need to start to work the top of the funnel and make the brand a bit more front and center and bring more people in."
Along with the shift from performance marketing to brand building, the omnichannel brand campaign also follows the recent launch of a new line of its flagship Lawn Mower trimmers and the brand's expansion this year into Walmart. This confluence of factors made it the perfect time to launch a campaign that embraces what Kertész calls the brand's "super power": the ability to facilitate difficult conversations around a sensitive topic.
"This is an area that you need to have a way in; it's not easy to talk to people about the groin. We venture into thousands of different metaphors, both verbal metaphors and visual metaphors, and at some point, you think that maybe we exploited everything," the executive said.
The idea of "The Boys" serves as a Trojan horse, giving Manscaped a funny metaphor that could resonate with consumers and give them space to embrace new ideas and possibly change their behaviors around grooming.
"The moment we saw that one frame, I remember saying, 'This is the single funniest frame that I've ever seen in my history at Manscaped.' That's where the campaign was sold. This has potential, this has power," Kertész said.
The rules of the game
For the brand and agency, the next part of the process focused on not messing up the central idea, from script development through production and launch. The team spent an entire day thinking through the rules of how the boys would be presented in the ads, from sizing to appearance to mechanics and beyond.
"We wanted it to feel as relatable as possible, to not make them characters or caricatures of themselves," Apaliski said. "Treating it with a little bit more of a cinematic lens added to the juxtaposition of what you were seeing. … Shooting in a very serious way actually heightened the humor that came with it."
Apart from the humor, the way various boys are presented in the ad — from hairless to groomed to totally unruly — speaks to the brand's values.
"We are very careful to not dictate a style," Kertész said. "If you look at that wedding scene, that spells that out visually, where you have every pair of boys in a different style. It's a way for us to say 'Yes, we encourage you to take care of down there … but have your own style, have your own personality, have your own idea of what is groomed for you.’"
To expand the campaign to more consumers, the effort includes an AR filter that gives users their own pair of boys: two mini versions of the user at hip height, populated with various grooming styles. In a separate video, brand ambassador Davidson tries out the filter.
"If these TV spots open up that conversation, the filter makes you think twice about it," Apaliski said. "It felt like a natural extension of the core idea of the campaign: something that would be entertaining, native to some of these platforms and apps and highly shareable."
Whether in the ad, the AR filter or real life, Manscaped wants its customers to consider their boys and what grooming means to them.
"It's a reflection of yourself," Apaliski added, "and you want that to be the best reflection.”
