Irish Spring debuts first ever Super Bowl spot and cleans up with a fresh rebrand
Colgate-Palmolive portfolio mainstay Irish Spring will make its Super Bowl debut at this year’s big game, today releasing a trailer for its utopia-inspired ad. In parallel with the advertising effort, the brand has announced it is rebranding with new formulas and packaging meant to appeal to young consumers.
Irish Spring, the classic soap brand born in Germany in 1970, today announced it will join heavy hitters Frito-Lay, Google, Taco Bell, Toyota and others at Super Bowl LVI on February 13. It will be the brand’s first-ever Super Bowl ad – though not the first time that the brand has caused a football-related stir (a Georgia grocery store famously pulled the product from its shelves ahead of a University of Georgia game against Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish).
Irish Spring today unveiled a teaser for the spot, which depicts an imagined utopia where everyone and everything smells fresh and clean. In the film, a middle-aged man in a graphic T-shirt arrives on a raft to a land of beautiful waterfalls and a community of white and beige-clad residents living in harmony. The land is dubbed Irish Spring, naturally. London-based TEN6 assisted in developing the creative.
“We’re all about nice smells and have dreamt up the magical nice-smelling world of Irish Spring to express that,” Colgate-Palmolive’s general manager of personal care for North America Emily Fong Mitchell told The Drum. “To highlight our commitment to totally modernizing the brand, we wanted to create a TV spot that pays homage to the Irish Spring’s history and association with humor, nature, freshness and scent, while bringing it to life in a new way that explicitly shows Zillennial guys what we’re all about. And that’s good smells.”
The brand plans to run the full-length video in a 30-second in-game spot – a move that will run it around $6.5m.
In tandem with its big game debut, the soap brand, owned by New York-based Colgate-Palmolive, has announced it is updating some of its formulas and will roll out new products in newly-designed packaging. The new packaging features a streamlined shape, a modernized logo and new graphics.
The new products will reportedly hit select shelves on Super Bowl Sunday, with additional rollouts slated for the weeks following the event.
Despite suffering supply chain challenges alongside countless other manufacturers and retailers, Colgate-Palmolive has fared relatively well in recent months. Though its latest earnings indicated mixed results, year-on-year revenue was up more than 6%, from $4.15bn to $4.41bn. Rebranding and advertising efforts like those under way at Irish Spring could help the company accelerate this growth.