Huey Lewis-Loving Hair for Old Spice

Ever seen hair play Huey Lewis songs before?

Well now's your chance, with 'The Power of Hair' digital experience from Wieden+Kennedy Portland, MJZ and for Old Spice.

"HTML video players do not have a particularly high level of control and are not designed to support the type of experience we really wanted," says Digital Creative Director Mike Woods, "so we created multiple video players where we could toggle visibility to create seamless ‘cuts’ between the intro, loop, prompts, and songs. When one player is playing the loop, we would load a video into the other player and then swap when ready."

"We had to find the right balance with manipulating the video clips themselves and the timing within the application. Creating a consistent experience across browsers is always a huge challenge, but this is particularly so with video. The challenge here was the HTML video player itself as it needed varying intrinsic properties on different browsers. Video on some browsers load and start instantaneously, while others have noticeable delays."

"With all the different platforms, devices and video versions, we actually have over 500 separate video clips sat on Amazon Web Services which we select from based on what device you are viewing the content and where you are in the experience. We have a CMS to control how we retrieve these videos, but the sheer volume even made that an epic undertaking."

"There is no hotter property in digital than Old Spice and we were incredibly proud to work on this, and deliver to a happy client."

Get grooving at: https://www.thatsthepowerofhair.com/

Credits

Agency Wieden + Kennedy Portland

Agency Producer Mike Davidson

Production Company MJZ

Director Tom Kuntz

Producer Lisa Barnable

VFX and development Framestore

Creative Digital Director Mike Woods

Digital Producer Christine Cattano