Helping win a presidential election and running marketing for a ball trimmer brand have more in common than you’d think – at least if you’re Marcelo Kertész.
Kertész, this week’s guest on AdExchanger Talks, is the CMO of Manscaped, which is repositioning itself from a below-the-belt grooming brand to a whole-body grooming platform – or, as he and his team like to put it, moving “from ball to all.”
Before he was doing that, though, Kertész spent more than a decade in politics and advertising, including as a creative director on seven presidential campaigns across five countries, among them the election and later reelection of Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff.
That experience is one reason he was ready for a CMO job, he says.
“It puts things in perspective,” Kertész says. “There’s no level of pressure that compares to those [election] campaigns I did.”
Being used to that kind of all‑or‑nothing pressure makes Manscaped’s current evolution feel a lot more manageable.
Manscaped made its first Super Bowl appearance earlier this year with a spot built around anthropomorphic singing hair balls lamenting their fate after being shaved off various body parts, an intentionally over-the-top way, Kertész says, to signal that the brand is no longer just about the groin.
In terms of KPIs, Manscaped is closely tracking social buzz, brand lift and the uptick in consideration. It’s not about sales, per se.
One challenge, he notes, is that Manscaped doesn’t sell something people buy a few times a day, like soda, so you can’t expect a Super Bowl ad to show up in the numbers overnight. The decision cycle for a trimmer is longer, which means the impact emerges over time.
Still, Kertész didn’t hesitate when asked if Manscaped’s multimillion-dollar Super Bowl investment was a good use of money.
“Yes, yes – it was totally worth it,” he says. “It was such a perfect moment for us.”
Also in this episode: How Manscaped went from spending around 70% of its marketing budget on the lower funnel to nearly 70% on upper-funnel campaigns, staying funny without tipping into “joke brand” territory and building a culture of experimentation by measuring test spend differently from the rest of the budget.
For more articles featuring Marcelo Kertész, click here.
