Should Dollar Shave Club Be Using AI in Advertising?

While several brands have faced backlash for using artificial intelligence (AI) in commercials, Dollar Shave Club is scoring some points for coming out with a new campaign that both uses and lampoons the controversial tech.

In the playful 60-second spot “We Put Our Money Where It Matters,” a CEO at a fictitious rival “Razor Corp” tells his team in a conference room setting that Dollar Shave Club has introduced its “best razor ever at a ridiculously low price” and urges them to find cost cutting actions. The options start with outsourcing manufacturing but then veer into zany measures such as replacing the shark in the office’s fish tank, getting rid of an in-office elevator DJ, ending “animal testing,” and using crayons instead of blades  — all amplified via AI.

The commercial ends with the CEO concluding, “Why don’t we just replace everybody with AI?,” followed by the silence of others in the conference room.

The tongue-and-cheek spot harkens back to Dollar Shave Club’s early days, when it was known for irreverent ads that helped drive its stupendous early growth — and later, the $1 billion purchase by Unilever in 2016, only five years after it was founded.

Growth has slowed since the acquisition, with Dollar Shave Club’s current CEO Larry Bodner blaming Unilever for abandoning the personality of the shaving brand. Bodner took over as CEO in 2023 after Unilever sold 65% of Dollar Shave Club’s assets to private-equity firm Nexus Capital Management.

“[Unilever] neutered the voice of the brand,” Bodner recently told Fortune. “They tried to make it too corporate, and they lost that irreverent, ‘on the edge’ humor. And when you do that, you lose the consumer.”

Does Dollar Shave Club’s AI-Based Ad Resonate or Not?

Dollar Shave Club still may have stepped too far in using AI in a commercial amid rising complaints over “AI slop,” a term coined to describe low-effort, low-quality AI-generated content that’s seen flooding YouTube and other parts of the internet. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola received heavy pushback for using AI for holiday ads — criticism that’s raised questions about creativity and job replacement.

Bodner told Advertising Age that the campaign was made to not only poke fun at the men’s grooming industry, but AI anxiety too. He said, “There’s so much negativity and concern about AI, like it’s this evil sister in the closet we don’t open it late at night but it’s part of our lives and we just have to deal with it.”

In response to the AdAge article, some respondents on LinkedIn agreed it was clever to use AI as a punchline. One response read, “There we go. Use it like this.” However, several questioned the quality and overall storyline of the execution. Another said, “You would think they learned from Coca Cola and McDonalds [sic], but I guess some brands will never understand unless they make their own mistakes.”