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Rexona Sensitive Armpits Wins Silver at Cannes Lions 2011
Rexona's Sensitive Armpits is a 2011 Argentine television film created by Ponce Buenos Aires for Unilever's Rexona Men Sensitive product, in which a rugged lumberjack's irritated underarm spontaneously breaks into an irritating melody until he applies Rexona Men Sensitive deodorant, dramatising the product's core skin-comfort benefit through absurdist humour.
The campaign launched in Argentina in July 2011, as documented by Clapboard, following a trade report from October 2010 described on Thisisnotadvertising Wordpress that positioned the work as an upcoming release intended for Argentina and the broader Latin American market. The single film asset anchors the entire campaign, relying on a compact, high-concept premise rather than a multi-channel content architecture. Its geographic home is Argentina, where Unilever's Rexona brand has long competed aggressively in the deodorant and antiperspirant category across formats including sprays, roll-ons, sticks, creams, gels, and wipes, as noted in background research compiled by Clapboard.
The campaign's objectives are legible from its construction. Rexona Men Sensitive occupied a specific sub-segment of the male grooming market — men with skin sensitive enough to react to conventional antiperspirant formulations — and the brief demanded a creative solution that could communicate a functional problem and its resolution without resorting to clinical or cautionary language. Ponce Buenos Aires answered with a concept rooted in exaggerated physical comedy, transforming an invisible physiological condition into a visible, audible, and deeply annoying spectacle. The Clapboard Score for Sensitive Armpits is 60 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that demonstrates strong conceptual craft within a tightly scoped single-asset execution.
Rexona Men Sensitive targets a defined consumer need. The product was formulated for men whose skin reacts adversely to standard antiperspirant ingredients, a segment that requires communication pitched at discomfort rather than odour or sweat alone. In Argentina, this positioning placed Rexona in direct competition with Nivea Men, which had developed a comparable sensitive-skin deodorant line across Latin American markets, as well as Dove Men Plus Care, another Unilever stablemate operating in the male grooming space. The competitive field in 2011 required differentiation at the level of creative language, not merely ingredient claims.
A 2011 Rexona marketing-plan document referenced on slideshare.net claimed the brand held a market share of approximately 44% in its referenced market, though the document did not specify whether this figure applied to Argentina specifically or a broader regional or global aggregate, and the methodology was not made transparent. No reliable Argentina-specific market-size figure for 2011 is publicly available from the sources retrieved. For context on category scale in comparable markets, United Kingdom deodorant and body-spray retail sales reached £548 million in 2010, according to Mintel — a figure that underscores the commercial significance of the deodorant segment even before considering the scale of Latin American demand.
In Argentina, the strategic insight driving Sensitive Armpits was straightforward: men who experience underarm irritation do not describe it in medical terminology. They experience it as an intrusive, distracting nuisance. Ponce Buenos Aires translated that lived frustration into a creative metaphor — the singing armpit — that communicated symptom, severity, and resolution without a single frame of pseudo-scientific imagery. The strategic discipline of anchoring an absurdist execution to a genuine consumer pain point is what separates this campaign from the broader category convention of performance-led, active-lifestyle deodorant advertising.
Bryan Buckley directed Sensitive Armpits. Buckley, working through production company Hungry Man, brought a command of physical comedy and tight narrative economy to a concept that required both. The film's central image — a lumberjack whose armpit audibly sings an irritating tune — demanded performance, sound design, and editing discipline in equal measure. The decision to cast the protagonist as a rugged, stereotypically masculine figure sharpens the comic contrast: the more physically imposing the man, the more absurd and emasculating the singing armpit becomes.
The creative leadership at Ponce Buenos Aires for this campaign comprised Chief Creative Officers Hernán Ponce, Walter Aregger, and Hernán Ibarra, with Creative Directors Ricardo Armentano, Joaquín Cubría, and Analía Ríos, as documented across adsoftheworld.com and thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com. Art direction was handled by Gabriel Huici and Norberto Vatrano, and the copy was written by Juan Pablo Lufrano. The depth of senior creative involvement on a single thirty-second film reflects the ambition Ponce placed in this execution.
The campaign's recognition at Cannes Lions 2011 came specifically in the Film Craft category for Best Use of Music, as reported by sources including thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com. That category distinction is meaningful: it credits not the concept in isolation but the integration of a musical device as a storytelling mechanism. The irritating melody the armpit performs is not incidental — it is the problem itself rendered audible. Winning a Silver Lion in this category signals that the jury recognised the music as a craft decision rather than a production flourish. Production credits for the full sound design and music composition team on Sensitive Armpits are not publicly documented beyond what has been attributed to Hungry Man and director Bryan Buckley in available trade records.
Sensitive Armpits won a Silver Lion at Cannes Lions 2011 in the Film Craft category for Best Use of Music, as reported by thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com and corroborated across records held by Clapboard. This represents the campaign's primary and most verifiable performance benchmark. For a single-asset film produced in Argentina for a regionally scoped product launch, a Cannes Lions Silver represents a significant return on creative investment — placing the work in global conversation with campaigns produced by agencies operating with considerably larger production budgets and media footprints.
No publicly available media-performance data — such as reach figures, brand-recall lift, or sales impact attributed directly to this campaign — has been surfaced in retrieved sources. This is consistent with the standard disclosure practice of fast-moving consumer goods brands operating in Latin American markets in 2011, where campaign effectiveness data was rarely published externally. What the Cannes Lions result does confirm is that the campaign's film craft, and specifically its use of music as a narrative device, was evaluated as among the strongest in its class globally that year.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on the reliability of a single strong insight executed with precision. The concept requires no exposition, no voiceover correction, and no supporting print or digital materials to land its message. In a category where creative work frequently over-explains its functional claims, Sensitive Armpits communicates the problem, the product, and the resolution within a self-contained comedic arc — a structural quality that Clapboard's editorial team identifies as the primary driver of the campaign's durability in creative archives.
Sensitive Armpits is a 2011 Argentine television film created by Ponce Buenos Aires for Unilever's Rexona Men Sensitive deodorant. It depicts a lumberjack whose irritated underarm sings an annoying melody until he applies Rexona Men Sensitive, dramatising the product's skin-comfort benefit through absurdist physical comedy. The campaign won a Cannes Lions Silver in 2011.
Bryan Buckley directed Sensitive Armpits through production company Hungry Man. Buckley's direction brought physical comedy and narrative economy to the concept. Creative oversight was provided by Chief Creative Officers Hernán Ponce, Walter Aregger, and Hernán Ibarra at Ponce Buenos Aires, as documented across adsoftheworld.com and thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com.
Sensitive Armpits won a Silver Lion at Cannes Lions 2011 in the Film Craft category for Best Use of Music, as reported by thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com. The award recognised the integration of a musical device — the armpit's irritating melody — as a core storytelling mechanism rather than a decorative production element.
Ponce Buenos Aires created Sensitive Armpits for Unilever's Rexona Men Sensitive brand in Argentina. The agency's creative team included Chief Creative Officers Hernán Ponce, Hernán Ibarra, and Walter Aregger, Creative Directors Ricardo Armentano, Joaquín Cubría, and Analía Ríos, and copywriter Juan Pablo Lufrano, per records on adsoftheworld.com.
Rexona Sensitive Armpits was published in Argentina in July 2011, as documented by Clapboard. A trade report on thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com dated October 2010 had previously described the campaign as a forthcoming launch intended for Argentina and the wider Latin American market, indicating significant lead time before its official release.
Rexona Sensitive Armpits holds a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100. This score reflects a campaign with strong conceptual craft and a clearly executed single-asset structure, recognised at Cannes Lions 2011, but scoped narrowly as one film without a documented multi-channel or extended creative system behind it.
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