Surely you’ve seen the TV ads. Ex-football player Isaiah Mustafa, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” taking his audience from a bathroom, to a sailboat, to a beach scene on horseback, all the while spouting an absurd, deadpan hyper-masculine monologue. It’s great advertising, a campaign that I think has helped shift Old Spice’s image away from “little white bottle in my grandfather’s medicine cabinet” to “cool, masculine scent that [young] women love.”
Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”.
The videos have been a smash hit, with PCWorld calling them “the most brilliant viral ad campaign of its time”. Total views on Old Spice’s YouTube channel are over 100 million, while Google Trends reports a huge spike in searches for Old Spice:
Click Image to Enlarge
At MLC, we never counsel members to shoot for virality in their online campaigns. What we’ve learned from discussions with countless B2C marketers is that you can check all the “viral” boxes and still have a campaign that flops. There are simply too many variables in what achieves currency on the web for any marketer to accurately predict that a campaign will go viral.
But, the subset of campaigns that do go viral do have a few of these things in common:
1) Cash. Someone may have told you that online campaigns are supposed to be cheap. Cheaper than TV, maybe, but Old Spice is spending some fairly serious money on this initiative. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was a sponsored trend on Twitter and the company is paying to get its branding on its YouTube channel – not to mention paying Mustafa and the video crew for long days of shooting.
2) Ego. By aiming most of the videos squarely at online influencers like Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as blogs like Gizmodo, Old Spice ensured that they’d have ample access to the huge network of followers commanded by those celebrities and outlets. But they didn’t stop at focusing on big names – they shot videos for all kinds of social networking users. They also engaged the ego of communities – canvassing Reddit and the notorious 4-Chan (absolutely not safe for work) for potential questions well before shooting.
3) Anticipation. Old Spice built anticipation into the campaign in a few ways – first, the quick turnaround of the videos meant was a carrot for repeat visitors; second, there was no pattern to the responses, so a reply to Ashton Kutcher might be followed by one to WebLover222; and third, the videos themselves were so wacky that users couldn’t wait to see what would come next.
4) Paradigm Shift. The campaign challenges the way people think about several things, in the process changing the way people think about the Old Spice brand. Everything from the absurd monologues to the production-line nature of the shoot to the idea of responding to random web users leads people to think differently about Old Spice.
Like I said above – you can hit all these marks and still have a flop on your hands; the vagaries of the digital market are still too much for marketers to reliably understand. But its good to know that there are some common threads – and at least a little predictability – in what makes a campaign viral.
Related posts:
- Measuring Social Media Effectiveness without Clickthru Metrics
- Good, Bad, or Just Plain Weird? Grading Advertising Effectiveness
- Social Media on a Shoestring: How Sharpie Engaged Community in a Tight Economy
- Leading from the Front on Social Media: Q&A with Jeff Hayzlett
- MLC’s 2009 B2B Marcomm Awards Finalists
on 22 July 10
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Nice post. But also worth mentioning that the success of the campaign has not translated to success at the cash register. Brandweek recently reported that Old Spice sales have dropped 7% in a timeframe that approximates the launch of the campaign. P&G may be willing to accept this decline if it repositions the brand for a new, younger (read: higher LTV) target demo. So, the campaign has been a media homerun and possibly helped reposition the brand, but it didn’t translate to sales. Does this mean that social media campaigns and sales are mutually exclusive? Of course not, but this is a case study which underscores both the newness of social and the complexity of connecting a media hit to profitability.
on 22 July 10
Respond
Tim – good points all – particularly on the difficulty of assigning causation between media campaigns and sales.
I read the BrandWeek piece, but I’m suspicious of their analysis, since it doesn’t take into account purchase cycle (how long does a bottle of body wash last? at my house, around 2 months), doesn’t include sales at Wal-Mart, and doesn’t mention sales in the target demo. It also only includes sales of the specific product featured in the spots (“Red Zone After Hours Body Wash”), and not the whole range of Old Spice body washes (sales of which, according to Forbes, are up 16.7%).
It’ll be interesting to see what happens as more consumers move into the purchase window – I think we’ll have our answer when that happens.
on 22 July 10
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As you point out there are some common themes that can be replicated big big and small companies alike. The next question is how do small and mid size companies do something similar without the budget of Old Spice. Here is one idea, http://bit.ly/bCxs72.
on 15 December 10
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[...] Old Spice’s campaign was massively successful on both television and, apparently, YouTube (you can see our thoughts on the campaign here). ROI is notoriously hard to gauge in advertising campaigns, but there’s solid evidence that [...]
on 7 September 11
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[...] favorite things about this one? First, how radically different it is from…more current Old Spice commercials. Second, the hilarious tone of the announcer, reminiscent of old public service announcements. [...]