The shower, it turns out, remains one of the last refuges of the unmonitored imagination — a place where a man with a razor in his hand can briefly become an oil tycoon or a master woodworker, without anyone asking follow-up questions.
Harry's, the direct-to-consumer shaving brand that has spent the last decade trying to take a few percentage points from Gillette, is now leaning into this peculiar truth with a pair of new commercials that depict the elaborate fantasy lives men construct while attending to their morning grooming.
In the first spot, titled "Filthy Rich," a man lathering up imagines striking oil, ascending to robber-baron status, and then — because this is how daydreams work — losing it all. The second, "Master Craftsman," follows a similar arc of invented ambition: decades of apprenticeship, grueling labor, and finally the production of a single perfect chair. (The chair, one assumes, exists only in the steam.)
The campaign was created by Golden LA, a West Coast agency collective, and directed by Saman Kesh, with Robert Thompson, the head of creative at Harry's, providing what the industry likes to call "steerage."
Harry's, which was founded in 2013 and has positioned itself as a friendlier, less aggressively masculine alternative to the legacy razor brands, has generally favored advertising that is wry rather than chest-thumping. These new spots continue that tradition, treating the male psyche as something slightly absurd and entirely sympathetic.
Whether the ads will sell more razors is, as always, the question that matters and the one that no creative brief can fully answer. But they do suggest that someone at Harry's understands the territory: the bathroom mirror, the wandering mind, the small daily ritual that briefly makes anything seem possible.
Original story published in The Drum: "Ad of the Day: Harry’s plays out bizarre fantasy lives | The Drum"