Sniffing Bert Kreischer’s Bits with Mando and MIRIMAR

Men’s personal care brand Mando has been partnering with comedian Bert Kreischer for some time now, but the partners may have just released their magnum opus.

Created by MIRIMAR, the latest campaign leverages Bert – and his famed preference for shirtless performance – in a bizarre yet somewhat spectacular experience that struts along the line between gross and grandiose, aiming to drive shares and earned media for a suite of social content.

​‘Sniff Bert’s Bits’ invited strangers to do just that. Doused in Mando’s whole body deodorant, ‘The Machine’ adopted a variety of classical poses in the centre of the architecturally stunning House of the Book performance hall in Simi Valley, and became a living, breathing sniff test.

Following a cryptic invitation, attendees were filmed smelling various parts of Bert’s body, capturing authentic reactions to the product’s odour protection properties and the comically uncomfortable intimacy of the ‘exhibition’.

“Any brand out there can tell you their deodorant works. Mando actually does, scientifically, so we figured we’d show, not tell (smell, not tell?),” says Cooper Bowman, senior copywriter at MIRIMAR, speaking with LBB. “Also, we had Bert. If we could show guys that Mando works all over him, they’d be pretty confident Mando would work all over them.”

No stranger to removing his clothes for an audience, this idea was “made for Bert, and only works for him”, explains MIRIMAR’s senior art director, Jayne Goodall. “You don’t need to invent a guy who takes his clothes off when you’ve got a really funny guy that’s already famous for it… It was a surprise to see a celebrity give 200% effort and enthusiasm to a shoot day, though. He was fantastic to work with and wanted everyone to have a fun time, not just the guests.”

“At the very end, we sent the clients out there. We told them he didn’t know who they were, but then immediately told him it was the clients,” adds Cooper. “Bert quickly threw on a second Speedo and then took it off under his robe, facing the opposite direction. It was incredible. They loved it.”

While comedy has always been a part of Mando’s brand tone, the creatives explain that this execution thrived on the tension provided by the juxtaposition of the exhibition’s ludicrousness with the serious craft it’s presented with in the social films and images.

“The epic location, the real opera singers and orchestra, the 35mm film, they’re all in service of the punchline… Go smell this man’s body. Go experience the ‘scientific breakthrough’ of mandelic acid,” says Jayne.

The location was particularly powerful, “setting the stage for a profound event” with its grandeur.

“From the very beginning, we knew that the more seriously and beautifully we shot this thing, the funnier the payoff of how stupid it actually is would be,” adds Cooper, sharing that Fox Den director Rich Downie and DoP Charlie Sarroff (cinematographer on the ‘Smile’ franchise) were essential for making “a beautiful, docu-style film that treated the subject matter with real reverence”.

He continues, “Rich and Charlie were the perfect pair, and we’d all worked together before, so we knew that we had that shorthand and trust that you especially need when you’re shooting something in a single day that involves unscripted interactions with real people.”

Therein lay the project’s biggest challenge: arriving to a shoot without knowing what the team would walk out with.

“So much of this rode on getting really good moments with Bert and the people sniffing him, and that was all basically unscripted,” says Cooper. “So we really had to trust Bert’s crowd work, some of the bits we had planned in advance, and Mando itself. Because obviously this all goes kerplunk if he actually stunk.

“It ended up being the funniest shoot any of us had ever done,” he adds. “We were all crying laughing, and that made the edit extremely difficult. We could probably cut a 30-minute version with all the good stuff we got.”

Launched last month, the campaign rolled out across Mando's social channels through a series of long- and short-form films, including a 90-second hero film, behind-the-scenes-style videos, a mock-interactive ‘sniff the phone’ activation, and an animated short narrated by Bert himself.

All launching under the platform ‘Don't mask it, Mando it.’, which has previously seen MIRIMAR create an equally off-kilter music video, Jayne believes it “proves how well that messaging can flex across a lot of briefs for years to come”.

So, it’s clear there’s more on the horizon for Mando and MIRIMAR – “More nudity,” jokes Cooper – but after the operatic comedy of ‘Sniff Bert’s Bits’, who knows how this multifaceted platform will be interpreted next?