Nivea Men's 007 spoof shows how #CoveringUpFails

You know his name; he might be the most dapper agent one will ever come across, but this time the Indian Nivea Men version of 007 just got busted for the poorest cover up. The film titled #CoveringUpFails takes a humorous take on a spy’s undercover mission due to body odor by drawing a connection with the brand’s product.

Outlining the cover up

Often emphasizing on the rise of story-telling prospect of the brand in their digital marketing strategies these days, Nivea Men created a fiction film-like audio-visual experience filled with humour and action, well, to some extent.

The film takes on a spy's undercover mission to bring out the significance of entirely solving the issue of body odour instead of covering it up because, #CoveringUpFails.

The resultant film, ‘An Epic Undercover Fail’, asks men to be better prepared for every important mission in their lives, be it at work, with family, in public spaces, or with a loved one. Because #CoveringUpFails.

According to the brand, in the cluttered category where mostly the brands of this genre talk about superficial fragrance, Nivea Men has attempted to challenge category codes and positioned itself as a brand providing concrete solutions.

They also claimed that the objective behind #CoveringUpFails was to build awareness about the problems of failing deodorants and resulting emergence of body odour during the day.

Sunil Gadgil Marketing Director, NIVEA India, said, "The Indian consumers’ attitude towards body odour is ‘Not my problem’. The aim of this campaign is to create relevance of Body Odour for consumers without triggering their defence mechanism of ‘Not for me’. This film is part of a series of films created by NIVEA India to seed the practice of ‘Odour control at the source’ aimed at consumers with the habit of spraying a fragrance on shirt for masking the odour.”

Though a pure fictional scenario was inculcated in the script of the film, the brand looked at targeting a few habits of using quick fixes to take care and did not target a specific audience per say. With a film of this sort, the brand moved away a tad bit from real life scenario only to produce a film that may not be relatable obviously, but manages to create a brand re-call through the script.

The social buzz

The campaign garnered 2 million views in a week, driving conversations around #CoveringUpFails, currently has 4.5M views on Facebook. Apart from the video, the campaign shared a couple of creatives to support #CoveringUpFails, both on Twitter and Facebook.

@NIVEAMEN_India Don john pass out because of body odour of agent, double odour seven collapsed to John.#CoveringUpFails

— JYOTI LONCHA (@jyotigujarati) November 29, 2016

At large, lacking creativity and not being able to withstand the image of such a global brand, Nivea Men may have gone a tad bit haywire with this concept of the film.

But in the clutter of brands that pushes the angle of impressing women with deodorants with sexual innuendos, Nivea Men focused on itself thus giving it a fresh turn.

Overall, the campaign managed to make progressive steps towards their over digital and social strategy.