The Old Spice man is back in the news, but has body washed his hands clean of the brand that made him famous. Isiaah Mustafa is in Australia on a promotional tour for Windows 7 phone, and stopped in at Bondi Beach for a gaggle of press.

Mustafa charmed the press and got the product mentioned in just about every major Australian news service, and even scored some international coverage, but some people aren’t buying the tie in.

Of course they’re going to get good PR out of this,” Greg Burlow of Lookmedia tells Marketing magazine. “But this typifies, unfortunately, how both marketing managers and agencies fall into a slump. Large corporations constantly need to evolve their marketing strategy because, otherwise, they’ll fall into traps like this.

“It’s embarrassing really, that a company of that size and financial backing to do something different would reduce themselves to something that simplistic and lowbrow.”

Grant Titmus, Principal at Melbourne-based Red Agency, tells Marketing magazine it’s not all bad.

“It’s going to get publicity because of who is being used, that’s the intention. The fact that this question is being asked means they win,” he says. ‘The fact that they’re using him is a good thing, people are already talking about it. I don’t see that there are too many downsides to that.

But Titmus and Burlow agree that the PR effort may not necessarily achieve its ultimate goal.

If the objective of getting the guy out here is for raising profile, then that will work,” Titmus says, “if objective is to sell product, that may be a different issue.”