Axe Dark Temptation
Chocolate Man
Ponce Buenos Aires
With its Chocolate Man spot for Axe deodorant, Argentinean agency Ponce Buenos Aires gave a familiar ad campaign a surreal twist. When the spot was released, a global ad campaign for Axe (also branded as Lynx) had been running for some time, based on the notion that the anti-perspirant spray made users magnetically attractive to women. The spot for the Dark Temptation scent in 2007 continued this proposition, drawing on a long-established symbol for female desire as its inspiration. ‘We started with a question,’ explain Mario Crudele, copywriter, and Jose Silva, producer of the ad. ‘What’s one of the most irresistible things for women? And we realized that chocolate is one of them.’
‘What’s one of the most irresistible things for women? We realized that chocolate is one of them.’
‘We thought that a man who becomes chocolate would be desirable not only for women but for men too,’ they continue. ‘We thought every man could fantasize about being treated as chocolate.’ The spot opens to reveal an average-looking guy in the bathroom, spraying himself with Axe. As he puts down the deodorant, we can see he has been transformed, and is now entirely made of chocolate. We then follow him as he strolls around the town, reducing women to a barely contained frenzy as he passes. They nibble on him, dip strawberries into his chocolate belly button, and bite him lasciviously on the bottom. At one point he makes hot chocolate for a bevy of beautiful women by melting down his own arm. The entire ad is firmly tongue-in-cheek, and the chocolate man maintains a maniacal grin throughout.
01-03 Photographs taken during the shoot for the Axe Dark Temptation commercial. The premise of the ad is that the deodorant turns its wearer into chocolate, making him devastatingly attractive to women.
‘It was the kind of commercial where the character is everything. If the chocolate man didn’t look right, the whole ad would have failed.’
04-07 The team experimented with a number of different facial expressions for the character. Director Tom Kuntz was inspired by the faces of chocolate Easter bunnies, and this look was incorporated into the final design.
08-10 Photographs taken during the shoot for the Chocolate Man commercial, which took place in Los Angeles.
11 The Chocolate Man actor reveals his true features while relaxing on set.
‘We found some inconveniences due to the nature of the suit. It was not easy to put on or take off. The weather was very hot and since the only place to fan some cool air into the suit was the mouth, the guy in the suit didn’t have the best of times.’
12-15 Photographs from the shoot. Rather than use CGI effects, a suit was created for the Chocolate Man actor to wear. Unfortunately, the suit was very difficult to take on and off and was extremely hot. The only way to fan the actor within was via his mouth, as shown in image 12.
The spot’s director, Tom Kuntz, devised this expression, along with the overall look of the chocolate man. ‘A large part of the early development was simply figuring out how literal or abstract we would go with what this boy turned into,’ he explains. ‘We eventually arrived at the idea of making him look like chocolate the way that Easter bunnies are made to look like chocolate. There was one bunny I found that had bright white eyes, which I found very funny, so we embraced that in our design.’
‘It was the kind of commercial where the character is everything,’ agree Crudele and Silva. ‘If the chocolate man didn’t look right, the whole ad would have failed. So we went through many different stages until it was right. We discussed things that might not seem important, but everything adds up in the end – for example, what tonality should the brown paint used to colour the suit be? Facial expression was very important too. We even discussed whether the chocolate man should have teeth.’
Rather than use CGI to create the chocolate man, the creatives and director decided to make a suit that could be worn by an actor. The suit was created by Stan Winston Studios (now Legacy Effects), and was laborious to make. ‘The actor had to come in and get a full body scan that perfectly charted the contours of his body so that the suit was carved to fit him like a glove,’ says Kuntz. ‘From there we did a ton of face experiments, working hard to get the eyes and the smile to be absurd and funny.’
Despite this careful planning, the suit proved to be problematic when it came to the shoot, which took place in Los Angeles. ‘We found some inconveniences due to the nature of the suit,’ say Crudele and Silva. ‘It was not easy to put on or take off. The weather was very hot and since the only place to fan some cool air into the suit was the mouth, the guy in the suit didn’t have the best of times. The main actor got a rash [in reaction to the suit], and we still needed him to do the product shots where he transforms from a normal guy into the chocolate man. So we had to find a body double to fill in for him in the suit. Since the suit was custom-made, it was not that easy to find someone with the same body measurements.’
Regardless of these problems, the shoot went relatively smoothly, and the ad required little post-production, despite many viewers believing that the chocolate man in the final ad was entirely created in post. ‘Post was mainly used to clean up the suit,’ explain Crudele and Silva. ‘Seams and a few joints in the suit were erased in post, and post was also used to enhance the melted arm and add melted chocolate drops in the hot chocolate scene.’
Chocolate and humour are a deadly combination in advertising, so unsurprisingly the spot proved an immediate success on release. Its target audience also snapped up the Dark Temptation scent, leading it to become the brand’s most popular variety worldwide.
16-17 Storyboards were used to plan each shot in the commercial. A selection of the sketches are shown here alongside stills from the finished ad.