Dollar Shave Club is again taking the fight to legacy razor brands in its latest campaign, which launches today across connected TV, social and targeted digital properties after being rejected as a possible Super Bowl spot due to its use of profanity, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
In a hero spot for the “Bullshit Meter” campaign, a handheld device resembling a Geiger counter is used to detect B.S. as a man shaves his face with a competitor’s razor, which he learns does not contain “blades made from ancient samurai swords.” The man and a Dollar Shave Club representative then rattle off a list of things that are determined to be B.S., including badminton as an Olympic sport, folding fitted sheets and paper straws.
The idea of the moon landing being fake initially tests negative for B.S. before being debunked, while a wife’s love of her husband’s haircut — and her husband — is called into question. “If it's not Dollar Shave Club, it's probably bullshit,” the ad says in voiceover.
The ad is in line with the edgy marketing with which Dollar Shave Club made its name as an early direct-to-consumer disruptor. The brand made its first major marketing move a year ago after being sold to a private equity firm by Unilever, which acquired Dollar Shave Club in 2016. The subscription-based shaving company recently spoofed the idea of artificial intelligence in an ad created with the technology.
To take the brand to the next step, Dollar Shave Club originally intended for “Bullshit Meter” to run during the Super Bowl. However, a representative for NBCUniversal rejected the ad on the grounds that broadcast TV and FCC guidelines prevent the use of profanity, per an email shared by the brand. Rather than run a censored version, Dollar Shave Club pivoted away from the big game to other channels.
“There's a whole ecosystem around the best Super Bowl ads… and there's a separate ecosystem, which is how are you connecting with people on a day-to-day basis, versus the peak of the Super Bowl. It was an easy pivot… to say we're just going to go run our own play. Frankly, that's what the brand is known for, anyhow,” said CEO Larry Bodner.
From AI to BS
The “Bullshit Meter” campaign follows close on the heels of “We Put Our Money Where It Matters,” a campaign that used outlandish, AI-generated imagery to take on “corporate B.S.” and the idea of AI itself. The previous campaign joined efforts from brands including Almond Breeze and Equinox that have spoofed generative AI in marketing and media.
“They both scored incredibly well on breakthrough and recall, but actually the B.S. meter exceeded all of our expectations in terms of the testing, which is why we then [tried] to run this on the Super Bowl,” Bodner said.
After the new campaign, Dollar Shave Club has more advertising to come in the same “genre” as “We Put Our Money Where It Matters,” Bodner said, along with campaigns around core brand messages and yet-to-be-announced product innovations. The executive sees the brand’s recent run of creative, which also includes an effort created by a customer-staffed internal agency named the Order of the Blade, as a return to the laugh-out-loud comedy that helped the brand establish itself in the first place.
“We're going to keep going down this road of keeping it real and calling things out in a way which borders on the absurd, because I think that helps break through, and it helps recall, and it does also makes people really want to engage,” Bodner said.
