Dollar Shave Club is introducing a new product line, and you know what that means: more funny video ads.
The Silcon Beach startup has launched Big Cloud skincare including Daily Face Moisturizer with Sunscreen, Good Shake Hand Cream and Wind Master Lip Balm, and released a series of videos to promote it. Inspired by the American Southwest and its inhabitants, Big Cloud is supported by a campaign dubbed “People Notice” — that is, yes, people notice if your skin is dry and flaky, and they notice too if it’s greasy and shiny after using the wrong product.
The ads address this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” conundrum with three pairs of awkwardly amusing spots that illustrate what happens when you don’t moisturize, and what happens when you do with the wrong stuff.
The videos were conceptualized entirely in-house by the company’s eight-person creative agency team, which worked with the directing team The Spielbergs to execute the campaign. The Spielbergs is a collaboration between Alex Karpovsky, who’s directed five feature films as well as an episode of HBO’s “Girls,” and Teddy Blanks, who’s designed and produced title sequences for more than 50 films and TV shows.
The company is planning a targeted campaign across multiple social channels, though there are no plans to run TV spots for now.
Dollar Shave Club’s original ad, uploaded four years ago this month, has been viewed more than 22 million times on YouTube. Creative director Alec Brownstein joined shortly after that and has collaborated ever since with founder Michael Dubin, who usually appears in the spots as well.
Not so this time, though Dubin still lends his voice as the announcer.
“He will continue to appear in DSC ads, but it’s our intention that sub-brands like Big Cloud will have their own tonality, look and feel,” Brownstein told me via email.
Brownstein attributes Dollar Shave Club’s famously successful ad campaigns to keeping the creative work in-house rather than outsourcing to an agency.
“Many of us have been a part of DSC since the beginning, so we know and understand the brand better than any outside agency ever could,” he said. “We started with this intimate understanding of the brand and then we hired top, multidisciplinary agency talent. That resulted in better, more strategic work — for a lot less money than it would cost at an outside agency.”
Moreover, with offices right down the hall from the marketing department, “anytime we have a question or a concern about our work, we meet and talk about it right then and there,” he added. “There’s no back and forth between siloed parties. We all get in a room and hash it out.”
Brownstein also cites the advantage of the creative agency sharing the same objective as its “clients.” “Everyone at the in-house agency stands to benefit from the success of DSC,” he said. “That means we want what’s best for the company, not what’s best for our portfolios. That removes a lot of the agency/client tension wherein the agency wants to make work to win awards to win new clients and the client just wants to sell more widgets.”
Shipping 73 million cartridges annually to 3 million members, Dollar Shave Club is the number-two razor brand in the country with 16 percent of the market by volume.