Usain Bolt Teams Up With Unilever For “Dirt Is Good” Detergent Campaign

Fourteen years after Unilever hand-picked Reggae singer Courtney John’s song Lucky Man as sync music for its Axe deodorant summer campaign, the British corporation has joined forces with another Jamaican figure for another marketing drive.

This time, the company has teamed up with sprint legend and Clockwork producer Usain Bolt to promote its Dirt Is Good brand’s fast-acting Wonder Wash, which the company describes as “a laundry detergent specifically designed for outstanding performance even in a 15-minute cycle”.

“Helping to make one of Unilever’s 30 Power Brands unmissable, Dirt Is Good has partnered with the fastest man on earth, Usain Bolt, as part of its advertising campaign. Wonder Wash will launch in the UK, Ireland and China from mid-April across all major retailers before expanding to other markets, including France, later this year,” a release from Unilever states.

According to Unilever the detergent is a “new, science-backed innovation in response to evolving laundry needs, and the changing technology in consumers’ homes” for which Unilever has used cutting-edge robotics and AI, to develop.

The advertisement for the Persil detergent featuring Bolt has been released on YouTube.   According to British publication, Marketing Beat, the campaign will run across both traditional and online channels, marking “a departure for the traditionally TV-first brand, reflecting how the brand is continuing to reach younger audiences”.

The publication noted that in addition to Bolt, Persil will also partner with more than 200 #CleanTock creators, inspiring ‘cleanfluencers’ to put laundry front and centre in their work.

“It comes as part of the brand’s new ‘Play On’ strategy which leverages sport to champion the values of growth, resilience and potential and highlight how making laundry as effortless as possible can help people achieve their goals,” it noted.

“From the start to the finish line, the brief was about landing ‘fast’ across all communications, and who better than Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man to help convey this… We created Wonder Wash, our biggest innovation in a decade, to harness the fastest-growing consumer laundry behaviour- short cycle washing – so the campaign needed to be unlike anything we’ve ever done before,” Dirt is Good marketing vice president Tati Lindenburg is quoted as saying.

In mid-July 2011, Unilever had launched the commercial featuring Lucky Man as part of the summer campaign for its popular deodorant, Axe.   Lucky Man was the lead song for Courtney John’s third album titled Made In Jamaica, which he independently released in 2009.

Made In Jamaica was primarily a collection of lover’s rock and Rocksteady-tinged songs. In addition to Lucky Man, the 13-track album included tracks such as Ready to Go, Miss You and What It’s Like. 

As for Usain Bolt’s endorsement deals, Forbes Magazine’s last athlete’s profile, in which the sprint icon is described as “a marketing juggernaut with more than a dozen sponsors for which most deals have continued in retirement”, also notes that his biggest deal is with Puma, which pays him more than $10 million annually.

Bolt’s other endorsement deals include mobile service provider Digicel, Gatorade, Hublot, Virgin, and Visa, as well as Nippon Airways, Enertor, and Australian telecom company Optus.

In the meantime, the sprint icon has announced that he will be present at the most prestigious night in sport, that is next Monday’s 25th Laureus World Sports Awards in Madrid for which his track and field compatriot Sherika Jackson has been nominated for the World Sportswoman of the Year Award.  Shericka’s nomination was due to her winning time of 21.41 seconds in the 200 metres at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, which was the second fastest all-time, seven hundredths of a second short of Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 35-year-old mark.

Jackson has been nominated alongside US sprinter and 100 metre world champion, Sha’Carri Richardson and skier Mikaela Shiffrin; footballer Aitana Bonmati of Spain, Faith Kipyegon of Kenya, and Polish tennis star  Iga Swiatek.