Old Spice: Hey Man
Old Spice entered the Dutch market with a challenge: how do you make an iconic American brand feel relevant to a Dutch audience without losing the confidence and absurdity that made it famous in the first place?
We developed Hey Man, a platform built on the wink rather than the sales pitch. Not freshness and protection, but the brand’s own heritage pushed somewhere absurd, until it reads as something you want to watch instead of something you sit through.
To launch the platform we created a series of AI-generated campaign content including new brand characters, a horse and an octopus. Because why not.
Developing it in our own AI Lab meant full control over every frame. Whatever the idea asked for, we could put in: an octopus handing over the product, an Old Spice logo shaved into a fade, a scene nobody would sign off on in a normal production schedule.
Fast, scalable, and absurd on purpose.
Hey Man is a campaign we produced end to end in the Wolfstreet AI Lab. No shoot, no cast, no location: every frame of the DOOH launch was generated, art-directed and finished in-house.
That starts with the characters. The horse and the octopus were built as consistent brand characters, not one-off prompts. We trained them into a custom model so they hold their look across scenes, angles and formats, from a 16:9 screen at a festival to a vertical story on a phone. That is what turns a synthetic character into a brand asset instead of a lucky image.
The process ran the way a normal production runs, just faster. Script and boards first. Then previs in synthetic stills to lock the joke, the framing and the product moment. Then motion, with several takes per scene, the same way a director shoots options. Then finishing: colour, sound and the Old Spice logo where it needs to be, checked by the same post-production team that finishes our live-action work.
AI did not replace the craft. It moved it. The creative team spent its time on the idea and the timing of the gag, not on waiting for a shoot day. Post-production spent its time on making the absurd feel premium: clean edges, real texture, a fade that looks shaved rather than pasted.
Brand safety was built into the pipeline. Every asset went through a rights and usage check before it left the building, so the brand could run the work on DOOH, at Tomorrowland and Mysteryland and on social without a second thought.
What Old Spice got out of it: a launch platform that grows with the calendar. When a festival activation or a boat party needed a new set of assets, the AI Lab turned them around in days, in the same visual world, without a reshoot.
(D)OOH was the start, not the whole plan.
Screens where the audience already had its guard down.
