When I was a kid, Old Spice meant one thing; an easy Christmas present idea for Grandpa. Old Spice After Shave had become such a cliche’ “old man’s” product that 5 years ago the company seemed bound for extinction. But old man Old Spice or whoever was running things over there must have retired because recently, Old Spice has gone balls out to re-brand themselves as a cool and even SUBVERSIVE line. And guess what? It’s working! Old Spice isn’t just an after shave any more, it’s a BRAND….a brand that promotes itself with hilarious and faux-serious ads featuring cocky centaurs and Bruce Campbell crooning Hungry Like the Wolf. Suddenly we find ourselves living in a crazy, topsy turvery world where Old Spice the brand seems to be totally in tune with what gets the attention of young males.

A few months back, Old Spice took another step in what they must think of as their “let’s get relevant campaign” by announcing they would be teaming up with Poptent in a search for user-generated video content. If you don’t know what Poptent is it’s like a video contest website….except that it isn’t. I’ve been noticing more and more third party websites running other companies’ video contests and I usually try and stay away from those. My thinking is that if a company cared enough they would just run the contest themselves. More importantly though, who needs a middleman getting in between filmmakers and the money companies have to spend?

But Poptent is different. They seem to be on to something there. They’re focused on building and keeping a community of talented filmmakers. And talented people seem to like Poptent. The quality level of submitted videos is very, very high. In the Old Spice competitions, serious productions actually outnumbered videos that were shot on cheapo cameras by bored teenagers!

The best thing about Poptent though is that they don’t run video contests. They hold open calls for video content. If a sponsor likes your work they don’t give you a prize, they BUY your video. So if a Poptent client like Bounce or Harley Davidson buys a video you submit then you can list those big name companies as clients. That is huge.

Anyhoo…today it was announced that Old Spice bought two videos made by Poptent creators for $5,000 each. One was a commercial for Old Spice Deck Scrubber and the other was for Old Spice Everclear. The chosen videos are pretty decent. Observe:








They’re not as good as the Bruce Campbell commercial where he walks in front of the giant painting but hey, what is?