The Lynx Effect: BBH’s twenty-year run, and the day it ran out

Nobody says “the John Smith’s effect”. “The Lynx effect” entered British English as a phrase you can use about a haircut, a promotion or a good week, which is the highest return any endline has ever produced in this country. Bartle Bogle Hegarty introduced it in 1996 for a deodorant aimed at teenage boys, and it ran, in one form or another, for twenty years.

The one-line take: a brutally simple strategy, executed with far more wit than it deserved credit for, that eventually made the brand unsellable to its own audience.

Credits

• Client: Lynx, Lever Fabergé, later Unilever UK
• Agency: Bartle Bogle Hegarty, London
• Endline introduced: 1996
• “Getting Dressed” (January 2004): creative director Rosie Arnold, art director and copywriter Nick Gill
• “Getting Dressed” director: Ringan Ledwidge, through Small Family Business
• Director of photography: Jess Hall. Editor: Richard Orrick at Whitehouse Post
• Lynx Pulse (2003): BBH executive creative director John O’Keeffe, head of design Matt Kemsley
• Succeeded by: 72andSunny Amsterdam, from 2015

The problem: a brand that had run out of edge

Lynx launched in the UK in 1985 and, on D&AD’s account of the brand, its early advertising ran on a generic idea of attraction that had stopped working by the early nineties. The category was crowded, the audience was fifteen to twenty four year old men, and the product was a fragrance sold to people who could not talk about fragrance.

BBH’s strategy landed on one truth and refused to leave it. Young men are preoccupied with the opposite sex and lack the confidence to do anything about it. The campaign therefore showed women finding Lynx users irresistible, which is a promise no deodorant can keep and every fourteen year old wants to hear.

What made it work rather than merely crass was the register. The films were pitched as knowing male fantasy, staged so broadly that the audience was always in on the joke. The brand never claimed the effect was real, only that it was worth a can, and the audience it was sold to understood the difference perfectly well.

The idea: exaggerate the daydream until it is funny

The run of films is a catalogue of escalating absurdity. A nerdy boyfriend becomes a magnet in “Dream Date” in 1997, with Jennifer Aniston as the girlfriend watching it happen. A traveller stumbles on a tribe of cavewomen in 1998. In April 1999 came a Pied Piper parody in which the double-crossed piper sprays himself and leads a procession of women out of town, directed by Harald Zwart through Pink Films, with the ad written by Marc Hatfield and art directed by Peter Bradly.

Then 2003, and the strategy’s boldest single execution. For the launch of the Lynx Pulse variant, BBH did not start with a television script at all. It invented a dance, commissioned a record and seeded both before any advertising ran.

“Make Luv” by Room 5, built on a sample of Oliver Cheatham, went to number one in the UK singles chart and stayed there for four weeks, according to D&AD’s case study. The track was placed with opinion formers in Ibiza in summer 2002, then with early adopters, and only then did the ad break in spring 2003, with the single released three or four weeks after it. The commercial itself is thirty seconds of a geeky man at a bar who becomes cool when he dances.

The craft: the best film has no jokes in it at all

The standout piece of the entire era does not feature a swarm of women or a punchline. “Getting Dressed”, made in January 2004 for the Lynx 24-7 variant, opens on a couple waking up in bed and follows them backwards across a city, picking up the clothes they had shed the night before, ending where they met in a supermarket aisle.

Ringan Ledwidge directs it as a reverse edit with no dialogue, scored to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s ukulele version of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”. Rosie Arnold was the creative director and Nick Gill wrote and art directed it. It won four Silvers at D&AD and a Gold Lion at Cannes, and was shortlisted three times at the 2005 British Arrows.

The craft lesson is the restraint. Every other film in the campaign shouts the promise; this one shows the aftermath and lets you assemble the story yourself. The endline, “because you never know when”, is the same crude proposition delivered with a completely straight face, and it is far more persuasive for it.

The results

This is one of the few long-running British campaigns where the commercial evidence is published and unambiguous. BBH’s “Lynx: the penetration game” won a Bronze at the IPA Effectiveness Awards in 2002 and reported the brand being used by 75 per cent of men aged fifteen to twenty four, a higher penetration than Coca-Cola or the internet at the time.

Pulse then delivered the sharpest single result. D&AD records it becoming Lynx’s number one selling variant within two weeks of launch, taking a six per cent value share of the whole UK deodorant market within seven months, double the share achieved by the previous year’s variant, and lifting Lynx’s total brand share to 19 per cent by the summer of 2003.

Those are the numbers that separate this from work that is merely famous. For a fuller account of the weight we put on published effectiveness data, see how we score.

The ASA file: where the strategy ran out of road

Lynx spent two decades close to the line and eventually crossed it in public. On 23 November 2011 the Advertising Standards Authority upheld complaints against two separate Lynx campaigns on the same day.

The first was a poster for Lynx shower gel that ran in July 2011, showing a woman in a bikini under a beach shower beside the line “the cleaner you are the dirtier you get”. It drew 113 complaints, several from parents who said it was sited near schools. The ASA found, in a case CAP still uses as a teaching example, that the combination of image and text implied a link between the product and uninhibited sexual behaviour, and that a poster is an untargeted medium seen by children.

The second concerned online display advertising for Lynx Dry Full Control featuring the glamour model Lucy Pinder, which ran on Yahoo, Hotmail, Rotten Tomatoes, Anorak and Spotify in June and July 2011. The ASA ruled the executions sexually provocative and degrading to women, and held that the placements on sites without robust age profiling breached the rules on social responsibility and children.

Not every complaint stuck. In a ruling published on 1 May 2013 the ASA rejected complaints about seventeen interactive Lynx films built around five female “types”, noting seventeen complaints against 10.4 million impressions and finding the humour distasteful to some but not seriously offensive. The regulator was not banning Lynx on principle. It was drawing a line, and the brand kept walking up to it.

Where it went next: Find Your Magic

72andSunny Amsterdam took the global Axe and Lynx creative lead in early 2015, ending BBH’s twenty-year run on the brand. Its first work, “Find Your Magic”, launched on 13 January 2016, replacing the swarm of women with a cast of men defined by their quirks. Rik Strubel, then global vice president for the brands, called it the biggest repositioning in twenty years and said Lynx was moving from talking to the teenage boy to talking to his older brother.

The follow-up, “Is It OK For Guys?”, ran in May 2017 and was built from Google and YouTube search data: the questions young men were typing in private, from whether it is acceptable to do yoga to whether they can wear pink. It is the same brand, inverted. Where the Lynx effect promised to fix your insecurity with a can, this asked why the insecurity existed.

Writing in Campaign as the switch happened, Richard Huntington called the original one of the greatest campaigns in advertising history, and then explained precisely why it had to end: it ended up saying too much about its audience, casting every buyer as a boy who could not get a date. That is the trap in any strategy built on the customer’s deficiency.

What to steal

• Write an endline that describes an effect, not a product. “The Lynx effect” became a phrase people used about their own lives.
• If you are selling a fantasy, exaggerate it until the audience can see you doing it. Irony is what keeps male fantasy from curdling.
• Break your own format once a cycle. “Getting Dressed” works because every other film in the campaign shouts.
• Consider launching the culture before the advertising. Pulse seeded a record and a dance months before the ad broke.
• Check what your strategy implies about the buyer, not just the product. That is what eventually killed this one.

The verdict

Twenty years of consistent, wittier-than-it-needed-to-be work on the crudest possible proposition, with published effectiveness data most campaigns in the all-time rankings cannot match. It is marked down on bravery, because for most of its life it took the path of least resistance with a teenage male audience and let the ASA do its editing for it, and on legs, because the idea aged into a liability rather than retiring gracefully. As a demonstration that one sentence about your customer can run a brand for two decades, it remains close to unbeatable.