This bitch smells like Eagle Fangs

Maybe I'm late to the party.

Maybe the Eagle Fang phenomena has been dissected, gushed over and memed about ad infinitum.

I don't know because I don't know where ad people congregate anymore to talk about these things. Adweek and Ad Age are magazines from a different era. Agency Spy lost its luster a long time ago. I think that can be traced to the day they decided to stop printing comment section from increasingly annoyed and underpaid ad agency creatives. And Fishbowl, well that's frankly for fish.

And so I'm going to give Eagle Fang the ink it so richly deserves.

It began, like so many viral efforts, with a "random" twitter thread...

I don't know who Ghost Mom is, but given her cutting wit and her righteous indignation, I suspect she writes for a living. Moreover, given her Greater Northwest address, I suspect she writes for Wieden+Kennedy. And, given my ultra sensitivity I further suspect this whole dance is an elaborate marketing ploy to widen the market for Old Spice and capture a growing female audience.

Suffice to say, I love it.

I love it because it reflects a sophisticated and insightful approach to market expansion. And it eschews the standard "best practices" that every packaged good company employs in their paint by number marketing...

"We need to appeal to more women, so let's swap out all the masculine pronouns for something more gender neutral and let's ditch the frat boy humor."

The Old Spice people went the other direction. They took potshots at gender stereotypes and created a playground for themselves to amuse themselves and the thousands of women who didn't play extras in the Stepford Wives.

In other words, they took a marketing challenge and did what brands ought to be doing more of -- they had fun.