If one has to spend that much time thinking about it...

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We weren’t really paying attention when that now news-cycle infamous Old Spice commercial ran during the Chargers-Bengals game but made sure we locked–in on it when it ran later in the afternoon during the Niners-Packers game. We watched it again on YouTube today after reading Allah Pundit’s take on it, here.


Here it is, in its 60 second wild card weekend ad spot glory:









AP never really settles on anything definitive with respect to the motive behind the ad nor, more importantly, the target audience and we were frankly at a loss as to what was the deal with the freakiness of it all until AP wrote the following:

The look of the ad is oddly timeless, too. There’s really nothing here to suggest we’re in 2014 instead of, say, 1985; the hairstyles and clothes in the high-school cafeteria seem outdated. That detail would be lost on an 18-year-old but a fortysomething mom might recognize it from her own youth.

Well, bingo. Not fortysomething moms rather 40 something men and Dads.


We fall smack dab into that market demo and as young lads growing up in our pre-teens and early teens we do indeed remember seeing Old Spice ads during NFL broadcasts and thinking to ourselves: well, there’s a rakish gentleman in a captain’s hat and country club blazer at the helm of a sail boat at half-time of this NFL game… this Old Spice must be a thing.


Subsequent to that, and for whatever reason, it seemed that Old Spice became branded as an “old man’s” product (seriously, if we are talking target demos, who the heck was yacht boy’s target demographic?) and now some 30-35 years later, Old Spice is attempting to reconnect with average, white, middle-aged, middle-class Joe that had discarded it during the 90s and 2000s with an odd-ball nostalgia piece replete with the clingy, stalking Mommy figures of our nightmares. Works every time.


Hey, listen, that’s the best we could come up with. If you've got a better explanation, we'd love to hear it.