Old Spice Super Bowl Commercial: Other Ads Pale in Comparison

Old Spice first demonstrated its brilliance when it started using Bruce Campbell in its commercials. As soon as those ads started to air in 2007, it was painfully obvious that Old Spice had some brilliant thinkers working for the company.

Old Spice has been outdoing itself ever since. Their commercials have become cultural icons, and they shall live forever on YouTube. 

Nevertheless, I occasionally wonder if we're ever going to reach a point where Old Spice's act will start to get tired. Their ads are consistently hilarious, but comedy is not immortal. Even The Simpsons will run out of gas someday.

The same fate awaits Old Spice's commercials, but it's a long way off. We know this because the company has leaked its Super Bowl commercials on Facebook, and each one is more awesome than the last.

The ads are typical Old Spice ads in that they feature Terry Crews shouting and stuff blowing up, but they're different in a surprising way. This is probably because, well, the ads surprise you.

Behold this one:

And one more for good measure:

I'll wait until you're finished cracking up to continue.

Finished? Good.

We can have a long discussion about why these ads work so well. There are a lot of contributing factors, chief among them the element of surprise and the continued use of Crews, a former NFL player and one of the downright coolest actors in the business.

The big picture, though, is relatively simple. Old Spice's target audience has always been regular guys, and there are clearly people within the company who know what will appeal to regular guys. The trick is to just cram as many awesome things into a 30-second or one-minute time frame as possible. It sounds easy, but it's a trick that requires a difficult balance between genius and everyday male dumbness.

Old Spice is really good at walking that line, and they're very good at changing things up without making them too different. They've been making memorable ads for close to five years now, and that they haven't lost their touch is pretty remarkable.

These won't be the only great ads airing on Super Sunday, but the competition is already over. People are going to go nuts over Honda's Ferris Bueller commercial and Volkswagen's fat dog commercial, but no company is going to be able to match the raw comedy of Old Spice's ads.

To boot, viewers are going to be suspicious every time a new ad pops up. It may look normal, but people will be watching and waiting for Crews to explode through the wall and start shouting.

That, my friends, is actually rather impressive. That's power.