Archive for July 14th, 2010
Old Spice
As 90% of the universe’s brands send their marketing departments to seminars on how to “use social media”, the others are making everyone else feel stupid by getting it spectacularly right first time.
Whoever is behind Old Spice’s campaign deserves a medal, or at the very least a pay rise, for showing how to take advantage of those much-obsessed-over new opportunities without overthinking, misjudging or watering down.
For those who haven’t seen it, Old Spice has taken its highly successful ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ commercial and turned it into a running gag which has taken over Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a whole other set of channels, where the Old Spice Man answers questions from real people in short, 30 second YouTube videos. It’s funny, addictively watchable and is starting genuine conversations online about the product. Here are three things I think they’ve got particularly right:
It’s funny and I want to watch it
No matter how many times it’s repeated, the adage that ‘content is king’ rarely seems to sink in. Without any massive expenditure, a celebrity appearance or indeed anything other than a film crew, a decent actor and a funny writer, Old Spice has created something genuinely interesting to watch. Putting your faith in a cleverly made character and some solid running gags take a bit of courage, but this is the kind of content (in novel, play, TV form) which has endured for millennia, with no additional software required…
And building interactivity into the concept rather than the technology means it’s easy to access and quick to make while still encouraging involvement.
It’s everywhere
It’s not a ‘twitter campaign’ or a ‘facebook campaign’ – in fact, it’s pretty channel-neutral. Rather than obsess over where their demographic lives, the Old Spice team have cleverly created a central campaign which can feed effortlessly into all of these channels. Particularly genius is the decision to proactively film the Old Spice man answering random questions from Yahoo Answers. It leads to good content, shows that they ‘get it’, and gives them access to another community in the process.
It’s suited to how people use the internet
This campaign is not a standalone asset created for a website and ‘spread virally’. It’s designed from the ground up to work with how people really use the internet. It’s quick, genuinely interactive, personal and open.
These attributes bring massive benefits – and means that Old Spice can do things like engage direct with celebs on twitter and garner endorsement by the bucketful without spending a cent.
