Double Pits to Chesty
Olfactory meditations on the greatest advertising run of the century
Last week, I was watching a basketball game on television, minding my own business, when my viewing delight was interrupted, amidst advertisements for such local staples as Lumber Liquidators and Bob’s Discount Furniture, by the slick sound of Daft Punk and the crisp image of Margot Robbie curled up in a gently curved divan overlooking a lush garden on the California coast. She’s on her phone, smiling, then suddenly—no—is that Jacob Elordi? On a motorcycle? By the time I processed the cameo, Robbie had vanished into the sea, in slow motion, surfacing a cut later in a red bathing suit with wide eyes and an open, smiling mouth.
Even I, a creature who prides myself on my unflappability in the face of such blasphemous propagandist efforts, have to reluctantly admit: that ad caught my eye. Two gorgeous celebrities, lounging around in paradise, looking to meet up, inexplicably diving into dark, salty seas. Sue me—I immediately wanted to know more. What could this audiovisual bacchanal possibly be selling?
It was said by Don Draper, America’s preeminent scholar of advertising wisdom, that the greatest marketing opportunity “since the invention of cereal” was that moment in the sixties when the six big American cigarette companies were staring down the blank marketing slate brought on by the surgeon general’s unfortunate recent revelation that smoking a pack a day was not in fact beneficial for one’s health.
“We have six identical companies making six identical products,” Draper says to a skeptical Lucky Strike executive suite in the pilot of “Mad Men.” “We can say anything we want.”
Draper was right about the power of saying “anything we want,” but he was talking about the wrong industry. The greatest advertising opportunity, ad infinitum, will forever and always be not in marketing cigarettes but in selling smells.
Fragrances. Perfumes. Deodorants. Think the shadowy image of a long, lean cigarette emitting a dark, mysterious plume of spiraling smoke is an ad agency’s dream? Try an even more illusory starting point: nothing. Because what, exactly, is there to identify with a scent amidst an exclusively audiovisual advertising landscape? Everyone knows what a woman smoking a cigarette looks like, feels like, is. Everyone has seen, been inside, a Volkswagen, a Chevy, a Toyota. You know what Gatorade tastes like.
There is, apparently, something called “FragTok,” an internet community of “fragheads” who really know their scents. This subgroup, perhaps, can conjure concrete olfactory delights at the mere mention of a specific perfume. The vast majority of us, though, represent a pickle for fragrance companies looking to tap into new markets. How to possibly convey the sensory experience of, say, Chanel No. 5, in a television commercial? The short answer is that you can’t. And so these ads have gone in the opposite direction: they don’t even try to explain what the scent is. Which is, from an advertising perspective, really, really smart (I’d argue the half-second cut to Robbie actually applying the advertised fragrance is the least effective part of that Chanel ad). Why waste time explaining what your chimerical product is? Instead, show what it can be by paying the two most “it” actors of the moment (at this time a year ago, anyway) an outrageous amount of money to star in a Luca Guadagnino-directed spot in which they drive unthinkably expensive vehicles and lewdly jump into crystal clear water in the foreground of the most renowned electronic music of the 21st century. Because if you’re selling a scent, you’re selling nothing. You have options.
The most effective fragrance ads understand this; others miss the boat. As a kid, our family got Sports Illustrated delivered to the house, back when Sports Illustrated still mattered, and cologne ads near the front of the issue regularly featured fold-out leaflets which, when opened, would unleash a microdose of whatever scent Polo Ralph Lauren et al were pushing at the time. Even as a ten-year-old, I recognized that these ads missed the point. I was no different from the average Sports Illustrated reader at that time in having zero idea how to even begin to imagine the scent of a Hugo Boss fragrance. Whatever idea I had, though, was surely more appealing (aided by whatever touched-up amalgamation of horses, polo sticks, and slicked hair was displayed on the page) than the one which actualized as I unfolded the tab and leaned in to discover the scent. As I inhaled, the luxuriant scene depicted on the page snapped into reality, and, suddenly, I became myself: a prepubescent child, hunched over on the toilet, snorting at some approximate, overwhelming, pasted-in fragrance I could rip out and throw in the garbage whenever I pleased (a fate met by practically all of those hideous ads). These tactile pages overlooked the power of the illusory, squandering the untapped, open-ended magic of the nose.
The most memorable campaigns of my youth recognized that the smell was besides the point. No example better proves that truism than AXE deodorant’s 2009 body spray campaign. It was universally acknowledged, back then, at my middle school (I was in sixth grade) that the AXE product line, down the board, was rancid. The stuff was ubiquitous anyway. Why?
Double Pits to Chesty.
Very few men born in the United States during the nineties don’t need additional context in support of that paragraph. To everyone else (you miserable philistines, deprived troglodytes), I offer the following video, perhaps the most influential thirty-second clip of my childhood, in an effort to provide a mere facsimile of the experience of a truly profound early-millennium, pre-teen American brainwashing:
Attempting to contemporaneously convey the effects of this advertisement on an 11-year-old boy in 2009 requires stepping into what today feels like an alternate universe, one whose fate was decided by a series of visceral, inscrutable forces which were, above all, highly sensory: the strict slamming of metal lockers, heavy palm slaps to bare backs (“five-stars,” these smacks were dubbed), elusive bobbing of curly, delicate hair. Within such a context, the imagery associated with the depicted motorbikes, sex, and ostentatious deodorant spray in this AXE commercial were a natural fit. From an advertising standpoint, we were sitting ducks.
The spot had it all. Think getting Robbie and Elordi to collaborate, in 2024, made a big splash? Try 2009 Adam Jones, a freestyle motocross biker who (for some reason) meant enough to the then-10 to 13-year-old demographic that enough AXE body spray flew off the shelves that year to justify a Double Pits to Chesty sequel featuring actually-quite-famous skateboarder Ryan Sheckler (who claims to have been paid a million dollars to appear) later that year.
When I tell you that the Palms Middle School P.E. department’s signature Friday “Lap Days” were thrown into serious jeopardy in 2009 because the schoolboys were too busy a) spraying AXE deodorant into each other’s faces and b) mimicking the “Double Pits to Chesty” move as we rounded the three-quarter turn around the cafeteria…I really mean it. The stuff was outrageously popular, even though (or perhaps, in retrospect, because of the fact that) the deodorant itself was universally acknowledged to be toxically odious. Marketing! If we’d sniffed the stuff out of a magazine, we might have keeled over. Instead, we associated it with this:
…and this:
…at a time when loud, fast motorbikes1 and getting within a two-foot radius of a girl were as close to our lodestars as anything.
The next year brought an equally unique, even more influential player into the fragrant propaganda game: the Old Spice centaur. I’d like to view the introduction of the centaur as a more mature, refined evolution of the AXE ethos; increased elegance and sophistication, underpinned by (barely) coded, and actually quite perverse, phallic humor:
The deodorant ad reached its unquestionable apotheosis just a year after that (you’ll notice the similarities between this pattern of creative improvement and Stanley Kubrick’s midcentury run of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon) with Old Spice’s “Smell Like a Man, Man” spot, an advertisement which single-handedly turned around the decaying Old Spice brand and may or may not be responsible for me having worn “Fiji” scented deodorant for the entirety of the 14 years since:
Now, I’m no Francis Kurkdjian, king industry nose; I’m just a layman, relaying the wisdom of the masses as earnestly as I can to those wizards and gods, magicians and sorcerers, who by day bear the grave responsibility, the full burden of the blank slate, bestowed upon only those staunch enough to handle the charge of crafting the next generation of pre-teen fragrance commercials. Judging by the recent Chanel spot, we’re in okay, if a bit too mature, hands. But, if a review of the last two decades of literature reveals anything, it’s that there’s always room for improvement in the scented ad game. Thankfully, our forefathers have provided a model—untainted, I assure you, by the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia which I can already hear my detractors baselessly pointing out—to emulate as we press forward into the dark unknown of our fragrant future.
For some reason, motorsports experienced a surge in mainstream popularity during this era; before the College Football Playoff cannibalized its New Year’s Eve programming, ESPN aired live “Red Bull New Year No Limits” events every new year from 2007 to 2011 (highlighted by Travis Pastrana jumping 269 feet off a ramp in a Subaru Impreza, live on national television, in the waning hours of 2009) and TV shows like “Nitro Circus” had real sway.