Isaiah Mustafa played the towel-wearing spokesman in Old Spice’s 2010 campaign, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”
The first commercial showed Mustafa addressing viewers directly from a series of surreal settings, including a bathroom, a yacht, and a beach. The rapid transitions, confident delivery, and deliberately exaggerated promises made the commercial highly distinctive.
The campaign was created by Wieden+Kennedy for Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice brand. Its central joke was that the spokesman presented himself as an impossibly impressive alternative to the viewer’s current partner, while the advertising moved quickly between visual gags.
Terry Crews also became strongly associated with later Old Spice commercials, which causes a common mix-up. Crews appeared in the broader “Smell Like a Man, Man” advertising work, but Mustafa was the original spokesman in “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”