Old Spice, New Media

How many times have you read articles about how big brands are and need to be, embracing Social Media? Twitter is laden with these kind of article links every day from a new report or latest survey etc. Some brands do it badly and don’t really know why they are doing it. Sceptics question the value of the return in quantifiable monetary terms but value can certainly be demonstrated in brand loyalty and customer retention.

There have been some great examples in recent years of how to utilise Social Media in advertising campaigns, to drum up a buzz about a certain product. You might stretch your mind back to how Ikea used one of their branch managers, Gordon Gustavsson, who allowed people to become friends with him so they could tag items of furniture with their names on his photo albums of Ikea catalogue furniture. The first person to tag the picture won that item. That was one of the best approaches I had seen but now there is a new kid on the block.

Enter, Isaiah Mustafa and a cult following. He is the face of a series of Old Spices’ ad’s and despite Old Spice having won awards previously to the latest ad incarnation, it is the latest ad that has gone viral on the Internet.

Few brands have or probably ever will come close to matching the innovative approach that Old Spice, the aftershave producer, used recently in their ad campaign. Old Spice started off by delivering a fantastic ad with prime time slots of US TV for their new fragrance.

Mustafa has become more than the face of Old Spice. Here’s what happened. The ad was interesting, amusing and entertaining and very short. Take a look if you have not seen it.

Unbeknown to everyone else and while they were enjoying the ad, commenting on it on Twitter and Facebook and bookmarking it on Reddit and Delicious, a team of creative, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. Iain Tait Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, is leading the effort. “In a way there’s nothing magical that we’ve done here, we just brought a character to life using the social channels we all [social media geeks] use every day. But we’ve also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time.”

The Old Spice Social Media team didn’t just follow the feedback on Twitter, Facebook fan groups and their YouTube channel. They went one step further. They collated a number of questions and responses to their ad by trawling through numerous Social Media platforms and then used Mustafa, as the personality and face of Old Spice, to respond to them, in character. Mustafa’s personalised reponses have a collective number of hits of over 4 million in just a couple of days.

Mustafa has been reeling off the responses to the likes of Ashton Kutcher, Alyssa Milano and Ellen Degeneres. But he has also responded to the non-famous people who just liked the ad and went to the time to tell their followers on Twitter or comment on it on YouTube. Take a look at a couple of the best ones below…

Old Spice has taken the use of Social Media in marketing to new levels here. They have gone beyond just using Social Media to let people follow the brand and say they like the product, and have entered into a two way dialogue with the character representing the brand. The responses are light hearted and amusing and often a bit of gibberish really but cleverly often manage to get mentions of Old Spice in there. This keeps the interest going, makes you like the brand more and will probably result in a surge in sales. The short episodic videos feel like they are more directed at the viewer than the ad itself, as they have an element of personalisation.

Unfortunately, as Mustafa says himself, all good things must come to an end and here is the closing video response to ‘everyone’, which is a suitably eccentric post. 

A tip of the hat to you Old Spice for one very clever strategy.

For more info on this topic, check out Old Spice’s website