The Fresh-Men | AXE

Challenge

AXE needed to build brand love among a new wave of teen guys. We re-wired this audience’s perception of AXE Body Spray by partnering with Marvel to develop The Fresh-Men, a new set of superheroes. Inspired by the “Media Multiverse” episode of Media Dystopia, this video comic book series spins off the end of Black Panther with super-powered students at one of the Wakanda outreach academies.

Creative Idea

We launched this the way a film studio would, kicking off with a trailer before Spider-Man: Far From Home, followed by high-impact takeovers on IMGUR, Uproxx, YouTube, and Marvel, and a killer activation at San Diego Comic-Con. And since no big entertainment franchise is complete without a mixtape, we partnered with Nas’ label Mass Appeal to develop ours, which dropped on Spotify.

We also meme-ified our characters to make our storylines go viral on IMGUR and Snapchat, bringing them to life via augmented reality. And, the custom brand experience that housed the comic also offered coveted 30-day free Marvel streaming trials.

Results

The results show just how much we changed brand perception among Gen-Z guys and increased consideration:

• Cinematic trailers for our comic drove 80% ad recall among teens. Fifty percent of guys wanted more Fresh-Men content and most importantly, our content changed perception of AXE: teens who saw the trailer rated AXE 4.5x higher in being modern/innovative.
• Positive sentiment increased +15% around @AXE and #TheFreshmen at launch.
• The campaign assets themselves were also best-in-class, proving to be memorable, relevant, and successful at driving consideration of AXE. Results showed a 17.1% lift in ad recall and +7.8% lift in consideration.

And we did this all at scale by reaching 85% of guys 13-24 and generating over 179MM video views of The Fresh-Men content.