Axe male grooming brand to send 22 contest winners to space. Really.
Smelling good could send you out of this world. As in, actually off the face of the planet, according to a new promotion from the Axe line of male grooming products.
Axe – a Unilever brand of shampoos, body sprays and deodorants – is offering the chance to win 22 spots on the Lynx sub-orbital plane from Mojave space tourism company XCOR Aerospace.
In Britain, Axe is known as Lynx – see what Unilever did there?
The gimmick coincides with the launch of the company’s new Apollo collection of products. Marketing taglines for the new items include “Astronauts always get the girl” and “Nothing beats an astronaut.”
In one commercial, a young woman rescued from an inferno by a studly fireman quickly abandons him for the spaceman she sees walking nearby (so unfair).
Axe even got Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who landed on the moon in 1969, to plug the campaign.
“Leave a man, come back a hero,” Aldrin says in the video below.
XCOR is set to start launching two-seat passenger rockets some 62 miles above the Earth’s surface starting as early as 2014. The short trips, leaving from the Caribbean island of Curacao, will cost nearly $100,000.
Unless, of course, you win Axe’s contest and make it through what Axe is calling the Axe Apollo Space Academy. To enter, participants have to create a profile on AxeApollo.com or LynxApollo.com and explain why they want to hitch a ride into space.
Those with the most votes will participate in a series of challenges this summer. From there, a smaller group will attend the Axe Global Space Camp in Orlando, Fla. – a sort of astronaut immersion program – before finding out if they’ve won a trip on the space ship.
It’s like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” just with an uber-modern glass elevator at the finish line.
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