Axe - Metamorphose (2003) 0:30 (USA)

Deodorant makes the Circle of Life go 'round.

Adland® is supported by your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi coffee.
Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 1 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
Dabitch's picture

A quicker edit was run in Europe last year... only a 20-second ad every time I managed to catch it on telly.

deeped's picture

Sometimes I wonder if advertisers take a second to think about "how would I react?" ...

Dabitch's picture

... when I did manage to catch the story, as I have a rather morbid sense of humor. My only gripe with the ad was the short-edit of it, the scene with him spraying it on wasn't even in there.

AnonymousCoward's picture

Does anyone know who sings the song to this commercial?? I've been looking everywhere!! Please help!!

AnonymousCoward's picture

All the spots including this one are fine with the exception of the audio encoding. If you are using QuickTime 6 as your site says it does, it would be a good idea to improve the quality of the spots using Cleaner 6 with Sorenson Video 3Pro for video and use the mpeg4 audio setting in QuickTime rather than QDesign. It works and sounds way better and is smaller in size.
Regards,

Greg

AnonymousCoward's picture

Love the site. Glad I don't have to use AdCritic.com anymore..!
I am a composer and sound designer and have a tip on the audio encoding. Use the mpeg4 audio codec setting rather than the QDesign non Pro version for audio which it sounds like you are using. It will give you much better results and since alot of these spots are music driven, will give you a better response as well. If you need help on the settings, I will be happy to provide assistance since I do alot of this stuff for my website and for clients. You can see some of the example on my site at www.gregives.com if you want from last year under News & Demos. The site is being update but the demos are there. A good setting revealing great results is: Select in the Movie Settings under Sound, MPEG-4 Audio, sample rate 16bit stereo 48khz which will sync the audio better with dialogue. Then select options tab and compressor should be AAC (Low Complexity), sample rate 48khz, Encoder Quality tab set to best and the bit rate tab set to no less than 112 kbits/second. You can also experiment with44.1khz and lower kbit rates as well, but the setting I give you will be small enough I am sure and sound excellent.
Here is a spot I did for Euro RSCG In NY
http://www.gregives.com/ftp-from-greg/newbal_ny_dc.mov

Good Luck and thanks soo much for this site.. Greg
Video info:
All the spots including this one are fine with the exception of the audio encoding. If you are using QuickTime 6 as your site says it does, it would be a good idea to improve the quality of the spots using Cleaner 6 with Sorenson Video 3 Pro. There is an update for OSX Panther on the Sorenson site too for free.

claymore's picture

Hey Greg. Thanks for your feed and sharp ears. It is much appreciated.

The codecs and settings that this site have been using were decided upon through an exchange with both Discreet and Sorenson techies and engineers. Both sides were extremely friendly, helpful and insightful, and we can't thank them enough. The codecs and settings were also decided upon with the basic end user in mind.

The current compressions were based on the following criteria:

We wanted our clips to play on installed Quicktimes going back to the first version of 5. It's amazing, even now, how many people still don't have QT6 installed. It's equally amazing how many people have trouble properly upgrading and/or installing plugins, even with the process being pretty much automated now. We decided on 5 as the baseline for these reasons.

For the video codec, we wanted maximum compression that was as lossless as possible, without overwhelming and crashing the end user's CPU (which is easier to do than you might think). The pixin' and deteriation of quality we saw with the spots at a certain other site as it was going under (before is was bought and resurrected quite nicely by a publishing house) was something we didn't want to do. Of course, we couldn't go back to the computer dark ages, for if we did that, the spots would be the size of a postage stamp. Bleh. So for this, we decided to use G3/Pentium III as the baseline for CPU handling.

For audio, the same considerations were applied, but with one notable addition - We wanted maximum fidelity, but wanted the audio to play not only on higher end aftermarket computer speaker systems, but also to play tolerably well on the chintzy built-in speakers still found in many PCs without blowing them out (people tend to get pissy over that sort of thing). I use a similar tactic when producing radio commercials at one of my more favorite studios - Before I approve the final mix, not only do I have it played through their mega-thousand dollar house speaker system, but also played through an old and decidedly cheap pair of Sparkomatic "Sears Special" auto speakers. Also, since some spots in our archive are over 30 years old with a primitive mono source... well, there's only so much one can do with that.

Your notes on MPEG-4 Audio are excellent, and we have looked into improving/switching, but that will still be a little bit down the road. It's amazing how many agencies and educators expect their employees and students to shine with old and/or default computer systems (the economy is partly to blame, as is cheapness and old school ignorance).

But I thank you again. I have preserved your notes and comments, and when that spiffy moment of change occurs, we will definitely use them with deciding the new standards. It's folks like you that help to make this site so darn nifty - Since Adland is a collaborative site where all time and effort is volunteer, and bandwidth and equipment is covered soley through donations (and often that's not enough, so we end up going out of pocket, like we had to do for the Pro edition software currently being used), knowledge is truly more precious than gold.

Cheers,
Clay

Riccco's picture

OMG! I'll never forget seeing this commercial and i've never use Axe products as a kid before!

Anonymous Adgrunt's picture

I loved this ad! I was a teenager when it came out. Thought it was so funny I wore Axe for years. That stuff truly stinks.