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“That linear model is dead. We’re no longer shoving content down their throats. We’re helping them be a part of the content creation.” – Dolores Assalini
There are brands that chase culture. And then there are brands that were culture, stepped back, and now have to figure out how to return to it.
Axe is the latter. At its peak in the mid-2000s, nearly one in two American guys was using the brand. It didn’t just dominate a category. It defined it. Body spray, as a concept, in the US, essentially begins with Axe.
So what do you do with that kind of legacy in 2026? That question sits at the heart of a recent episode of The Speed of Culture podcast, where Matt Britton sits down with Dolores Assalini, Head of Axe US at Unilever, to explore how the brand is rebuilding relevance for a generation that scrolls past ads, trusts creators, and expects brands to earn their attention.
Tune into the latest episode or read the transcript below to learn more. Here are some top takeaways:
Owning the Joke
For years, the Axe cloud was a running cultural gag. Middle school hallways. Locker rooms. Comment sections. Everybody had a version of the story. And for years, Axe largely ignored it.
That changed with the History of Overdoing It, a campaign that leans directly into the brand’s most well-known liability with humor and honesty. At the same time, Axe launched new spray technology that actually fixes the problem: a more controlled, lighter mist that prevents over-application.
Dolores explains that the campaign worked because the product truth and the cultural insight were the same story. The joke was already out there in the world. Axe just finally told it first, backed by something real. That alignment between product innovation and cultural self-awareness is what gives the campaign its staying power.
Social-First Is Not a Strategy. It’s a Starting Point.
When Dolores joined Axe a year and a half ago, the brand was still allocating part of its budget to linear TV. Her first call was to change that. Completely.
Not because television no longer exists, but because it no longer reaches Axe’s core consumer in a way that matters. What replaced it was not just a different media mix. It was an entirely different philosophy.
The brand now evaluates every piece of content through the lens of community engagement. Not “will people see this?”, but “what do we want them to say back?” “What do we want them to do?”. Dolores frames it as moving from broadcast to participation, and she is clear that brands that have not made this shift are still solving the wrong problem.
Creators as Co-Authors
Creators in the History of Overdoing It campaign are not brand ambassadors in the traditional sense. They are not handed a script and told to deliver key messages. They are given a premise and the freedom to make it theirs.
That distinction matters. Dolores explains that young consumers can sense the difference between a creator telling their story and a creator reading a brand’s story. The campaign specifically invites creators to share their own experiences of overdoing it, whether in dating or with the product itself. The result is content that feels authentic because it is.
This approach also reflects a broader truth about how distribution works on social platforms today. A creator with one follower can generate five million views on the right video. Reach is no longer a function of audience size. It is a function of content quality and resonance.
AI and the New Discovery Layer
Dolores ran a quiet experiment before the episode: she asked a large language model what it knew about Axe in 2026. What came back was essentially the campaign in summary, the product technology, the cultural insight, the brand’s honest self-reckoning.
Her read on this is practical rather than philosophical. LLMs are increasingly how people search for and evaluate products. The brands that show up well in those results are the ones that have invested in clear, credible, and culturally grounded messaging across the right channels. It is not about gaming the model. It is about doing the work well enough that the model reflects it back accurately.
She also points to a broader structural shift. The internet’s front door is changing. The path from search to Amazon that shaped two and a half decades of digital commerce is being compressed and rerouted. Brands that built their entire discoverability strategy on Google ranking will need to rethink what presence means in this new layer.
What Stays the Same
Through all of this, Dolores keeps coming back to something simple. People want to hear great stories about great products. The medium changes. The algorithm changes. The platform changes. The need does not.
Whether it was a pamphlet for Avon in the early twenty tens or a TikTok comment thread in 2026, the question underneath every marketing decision is the same: is this a story worth telling, and is it reaching the right person in the right way?
For younger marketers especially, Dolores offers a piece of advice that cuts through the noise: find something you’re passionate about, and the skills will follow. Because curiosity about the craft is what keeps you ahead of the tools.
