So You Don’t Talk to an Angel Like That

AXE built an entire mythology around the premise that their deodorant would make women lose their minds—angels abandoning heaven, underwear failing to remain on bodies, that kind of thing. Sarah Brandner, then Germany’s most recognizable model-slash-WAG, played the angel in their Excite advent calendar campaign that winter, unwrapping gift suggestions sent in by the public while being objectively very attractive about it.

What I remember more vividly than the campaign itself is the banned-words list AXE’s team put together to filter out the inevitable internet garbage. Bummskopf. Entenarsch. Puffratte. Eierbeißer. Someone was paid to anticipate every way a German internet user might try to get a model to say something disgusting on camera, and then compile it into a document. That document is, in its own way, a kind of folk poetry.

The campaign was exactly as cynical as it sounds. I watched it anyway.