How Manscaped Used AI to Evolve Beyond Ball Memes

Men’s grooming brand Manscape had a problem. It was really good at balls humor—but not much else. And as the company expanded further into the personal care space with hair and beard care products, it was stuck in a nether-region niche of its own making.

Onstage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Jori Evans, Manscaped social media director, and Michael Miller, Consiglieri founder and head of creative, shared how the balls-trimmer brand broke out of its pigeon hole on social without abandoning its roots.

Manscaped was a beta tester for Clamor, an AI tool created by Consiglieri to help brands understand social chatter in real time. The tool connects to all social platforms that a brand has a presence on, and analyzes how people are interacting on each platform. Then, the tool gives content suggestions for each channel.

“It’ll just be brutally honest with you,” Miller said. The tool tells marketers when to stop interacting on certain subject matters or topics, and where to lean in, he said. “It understands sarcasm. It understands the emojis that understand when you’re saying saying something is bad, and you really mean that it’s good.”

After Manscaped launched its “Send Face Pics Instead” campaign last year, Evans used Clamor to keep close tabs on how the messaging was landing with fans.

“I really do attribute a lot of the success of ‘Send Face Pics’ to using Clamor,” Evans said. “We did a Super Bowl commercial, and this did better than the Super Bowl,” Evans said.

Letting Clamor do the work of scanning and analyzing social has freed Evans up to spend more time on the creative and less time scrolling, she said.

“It hasn’t totally taken me offline by any means, but it’s given me a lot more space as a two-person, organic social team to create better work and better creative that’s more impactful for the brand,” she said.

It’s also made it easier for Evans to advocate for more social spend.

“Pre-Clamor, not that much money thrown at social. Post-Clamor, it makes the case much more quickly,” Evans said. “I’m starting to get more budget and putting things behind me, because I’m able to prove it out much faster with organic social.”

Evans added that Manscaped isn’t using AI-generated content on social media. This year’s Super Bowl ad featured animated balls of pubic hair, which some viewers may have assumed were created using AI. To reinforce that the ad was made by humans, Evans sent behind-the-scenes clippings to meme pages and clipping agencies explaining that the ad was made by humans.

“It changed the sentiment of our Super Bowl commercial almost instantaneously once we released that content,” Evans said.