In a Super Bowl full of surprise first-time advertisers, Dr. Squatch may be the least likely yet—a mostly direct-to-consumer men’s personal care brand just starting to emerge from a crowded field built by social media marketing.
Raindrop Marketing, a San Diego shop that’s worked since 2017 for Dr. Squatch, producing viral videos that have racked more than 300 million views on YouTube alone, made the Super Bowl spot the brand is releasing today, as well as two teasers that broke yesterday.
Dr. Squatch, also based for years in San Diego before moving recently up Interstate 5 to Los Angeles, has seen its annual sales rate skyrocket 350% each of the past two years, topping $100 million last year.
Unlike some rivals, Dr. Squatch hasn’t yet moved into stores, but is sold on Amazon. Also unlike its mostly crunchy-granola competitive set, including Unilever’s Schmidt’s Naturals and Procter & Gamble Co.’s Native, the creative DNA for Dr. Squatch seems to come more from P&G’s Old Spice, and Unilever’s Dollar Shave Club and Axe (particularly from the unreformed pre-2017 era).
“From a messaging standpoint, we’ve taken the approach of being a product for the everyday mass male consumer,” says Dr. Squatch CEO and founder Jack Haldrup. “There are a lot of people out there in the market. But I think that space has been a little underserved.”