When the competition gets fierce, advertising by brands soon follows suit in interesting ways. Brands often tend to take direct jabs at each other in a display of superiority. The result is usually an entertaining back and forth of witticisms. One such brand war took place between Dove and Pantene back in 2010.

P&G had launched a hoarding based ad campaign to promote a new shampoo by Pantene. They claimed that a new mystery shampoo was in town and 80% of women preferred it over anything else. They further asked people to send an SMS to receive a free sample so they can try it out for themselves. The name or brand of the shampoo wasn’t revealed with the intention of generating intrigue and building curiosity among people. This however proved to bite them back as their rival brand Dove owned by HUL saw this as a great opportunity to take a shot at them. HUL put up its own hoardings to take advantage of this oversight by P&G before they could unveil the mystery. These hoardings by HUL said that there was no mystery since everyone knows that Dove is the No. 1 shampoo. The blunder on P&G’s part was they took too long to reveal their product and HUL’s prompt action on this did a great job of ambushing the campaign resulting in better sales numbers for Dove.

Here’s how it went.

Courtesy: @TobyFoy on Twitter