You have to hand it to Old Spice and its creative agency, Wieden + Kennedy: When they go stupid, they go all in on the stupid.
The brand’s newest bizarre promotion is a two-hour movie called Invisible World, posted Thursday to YouTube and game-focused streaming service Twitch (where it’s already gotten almost 7 million views). The gimmick? It’s an invisible movie, with almost nothing to see except a transparent background familiar to any Photoshop fan.
Created to promote a new Old Spice Invisible Spray antiperspirant, the movie isn’t 100 percent invisible, as there are occasional subtitles and even a few truly strange moments involving people wearing full-body greenscreen suits. These easter-egg moments make the long-form clip worth skipping through, through probably not quite worth watching in its entirety.
Its basically a sci-fi flick that combines a wide range of clichés, tropes, pop-culture references and occasional Old Spice brand mentions. There seem to be aliens vaporizing and/or abducting people, and the quest for a guy’s missing girlfriend, and … a lot of yelling the word “slab!”
The film was partially crowdsourced, as the brand ran a series of recent casting-call tweets. (Fans ended up with roles ranging from an overzealous train conductor to a professional halftime game announcer to a squawking, flapping pterodactyl.) There’s even an IMDb page featuring all the voice talents, most of whom don’t have any other credits to speak of.
Here are a few gems we stumbled across:
• Around 20:45, we get a nice moment of self-awareness acknowledging that viewers are probably just skipping around the film: “This is a catastrophic event. The human race is in big trouble. How can you not see that? Are you just skipping around on the plot? It’s like you’re not paying attention to the whole story here. Do you not have the vision to see what could happen?”
• At 24:57, the visuals kick in, and we’re treated to a man in a green suit sucking one of those tennis-ball throwers you use at the dog park, apparently to simulate making out with an alien.
• 45:07: Mid-combat, an alien asks a valid question: “Why don’t millennials like being called ‘millennials,’ millennial?”
• 50:25: The characters suddenly speak fluent Chinese, because they’re in China, but still manage to make English-language puns. This would explain the IMDb credits for “Chinese Michael” and “Chinese Carla.”
• 59:00: During a Gremlins-inspired scene about getting a baby alien from a mysterious shopkeeper, we see more green-screen guys, this time handing a box to each other.
• 1:58:00: As a reward for making it to the closing credits, we get a bunch of Old Spice Invisible Spray product mentions. And more greenscreen guys. Um, yay?
CREDITS
Client: Old Spice
Marketing Director: Janine Miletic
Assistant Brand Manager: Eugenia Chacon
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Ashley Davis-Marshall | Matt Sorrell
Copywriter: Bertie Scrase
Art Director: Christen Brestrup
Producer: Evelyn Loomis
Integrated Production Director : Endy Hedman
Account Team: Ghada Soufan | Katie Schaller |Phil Williams
Media/Comms Planning: Melissa Meier | AJ Blumenthal | Kimberly Van | Cherish Lee | Graham Wallace
Business Affairs Manager : Kevin Moyer | Dusty Slowik
Strategic Planning : Drew Phillips | Gian Colombo | Andrew Clayton
Studio: Patrick Cahalan | Ken Berg
Audio Production
Production Company: Digital One
Audio Post Producer: Laura Ocean
Client Services: Chelsea Smith
Sound Designer: Reed Harvey, Chip Sloan, Josh Millman, Eric Stolberg
Re-Recording Mixer: Reed Harvey
Dialogue Recordist: Eric Stolberg
Animation
Production Company: Brewster Parsons
Senior Executive Producer: Sue Troyan
Executive Creative Director: Tim Davies
2D Lead: Tim Davies
CG Lead : Mike Dalzell
Content Services
Production Manager: Zoe Hoeltzel
Productionist: Jeredon O’Connor
Credits Outro Music
Vocal Arrangement: Walker
Executive Producer: Sara Matarazzo
Vocal Producer: Jacob Piontek
Vocalist: Matt Wilcox
Toy Production
Head of Print Production: Stacie Balzer
Fabrication Artist: Kevin Shaw
