Could you sit and watch a commercial for 14 hours? Procter & Gamble made one for Old Spice and it's just been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest commercial ever.
The company made it to promote Old Spice's new Durascent technology.
You probably missed it. The 14-hour ad aired on December 8, 2018, in São Paulo, Brazil, according to Guinness. It features hundreds of short clips that are edited together in a series of quick cuts.
The tagline? "Smell Amazing Forever with the new Old Spice."
Here's a 3-minute whiff of the 14-hour ad:
Guinness said the commercial took 20 hours to shoot and it took months to edit more than 1,600 clips. How did they do it? They repeated a lot of themes but with minor variations throughout the ad.
Guinness broke down just some of the changes from scene-to-scene.
- A man in his bathroom sprays himself with Old Spice.
- The bathroom scene pulls out to show two men on a couch watching the first scene on their TV.
- The second scene wipes away to show a man in a bar saying the scent saved his marriage.
- Another man watches the ad of the man in the bar and he starts laughing at the TV.
- Two aliens in a spaceship watch the man laughing at the TV.
- Two artists are seen painting the spaceship the aliens were on.
- We're back to the guy from Scene No. 1. Now he's in a locker room and the image of the two artists is taped to a locker door.
- An old woman is then watching the locker room commercial on her TV.
- And we're back to two men on the couch, this time watching the old woman on their TV.
And we keep on going with some mixture of themes, such as an alien and a man watching an Old Spice ad on a TV.
Actor Terry Crews joins the fray. He shows up in a bathroom with a mini-Terry Crews spraying him with Old Spice.
There was no indication from Guinness about whether there was a cameo by the Old Spice man on a horse.
The old record was 13 hours 5 minutes 11 seconds in 2014 by Arby's, according to Guinness.