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In case you were in a cave this week, Old Spice did their best to bring down the Internet (or "Interwebs," as I sometimes like to call this wonderful thing) with a 48-hour ad campaign.

It's classic Wieden + Kennedy, the stuff we all say "Dude, I so could have thought of that," but, of course, we didn't.

Over 180 short videos later, featuring, of course, the contemporary "Old Spice Man," (yes, the guy in the towel) and a cast of others, including Alyssa Milano and even some "regular guy" who used the Old Spice Man as an intermediary to propose to his girlfriend (relax, she accepted and doesn't even expect to consummate the marriage with Mister Spice) and Procter & Gamble and Wieden + Kennedy have effectively "swaggerized" us all.

But what grabs me about this is how classic 1960s ad stuff this all is.

Think about it: While "they" (P+G+W+K, as mentioned above) have definitely lipstick-ed up the pig, as the Mad Men used to say, what has changed in what Old Spice is actually selling?

So, yesterday in Chicago, all in the name of research (and the fact that I left my Chanel Allure Sport deodorant in my Toronto hotel) I bought a container of Old Spice Swagger deodorant. While my image above is totally kosher re: Creative Commons, I can't find one that I'm allowed to use for Swagger. So, I drew one. I hope you like it.

The good news is that the product is excellent deodorant. Just as Old Spice has made excellent deodorant for all the decades that they've made deodorant. No better. No worse.

What does it smell like? Well, it smells like an Old Spice product. Vaguely perfumey...nice...kinda masculine but subtle. The usual. It smells neither like angels' breath nor like durian.

That's the beauty of this week's campaign: they took the absolutely mundane (a four dollar deodorant stick and lateral products) and made it cool. And celebrities were involved and they talked about it on TV and it's all over Google and people are asking whether the Old Spice dude is more fly than the Dos Equis dude and, well, I'm writing about it, trying to impress you with their collective brilliance/wisdom/vision.

And it's fun and we remember why we like advertising and, they're betting, why we like Old Spice.