How Old Spice Campaign Changed Social Media

How Old Spice campaign changed social media
July 17, 2010
Nicole Baute
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This week, something brilliant happened in a small studio in Portland, Ore.

A team of digital gurus and a bare-chested former NFL wide receiver named Isaiah Mustafa, created an unprecedented viral video campaign that made Barack Obama's presidential victory speech look like nothing more than a blip on YouTube's radar.

Old Spice's “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ads, staring Mustafa as a chiseled dreamboat moving through surreal landscapes while brandishing Old Spice body wash, launched in February and have generated millions of hits.

This week, Old Spice and ad agency Wieden + Kennedy took the campaign to an extraordinary next level.

The masterminds answered questions on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites with personal video messages.

By Wednesday, the team had churned out 187 video responses, some within minutes of receiving questions from viewers, and all of them hilarious.

Standing topless in a white towel in a bathroom, with the occasional prop, Mustafa, now known as “Old Spice guy,” replied to questions poised by celebrities and laypeople.

He crowned Ellen DeGeneres “Grand Princess Queen of all who are pleasant, syndicated and prone to spontaneous dance movements” in Eastern Latvia, where he claimed to have just been made King. He smashed a pirate piñata for Demi Moore and got into “a long-term commitment relationship” with Alyssa Milano (who then challenged him to make a $100,000 donation to the National Wildlife Federation's Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund).

Old Spice guy is deadpan, vain and prone to unrealistic claims of physical strength. But he's a charmer, and he's charmed millions.

The first videos were filmed on Monday but released on Tuesday, when they launched into a frantic real-time performance that was “more like live advertising improv” than traditional commercial-making, as Jason Bagley, one of Wieden + Kennedy's two creative directors for Old Spice, puts it.

The original idea is credited to Iain Tait, the agency's global interactive director, but a team of about 35 people made it happen.

Throughout the three days of shooting, “digital community managers” were locked to the web while three writers sat at a table with laptops, passing them back and forth to co-write the responses and grabbing props from a table nearby when it suited. A fourth writer directed Mustafa, who used a teleprompter.

According to Visible Measures, an independent company that tracks viral videos, the new rash of videos had received 16.3 million views as of Friday afternoon.

Matt Fiorentino, senior marketing analyst for Visible Measures, calls the campaign “unprecedented.”

“There's never been a campaign that has answered users' questions so personally and so quickly,” he says. “It just it wasn't just that, it's the way that they did it. The writing was brilliant. The acting was brilliant.”

Previous ad campaigns have indeed thrived off audience participation. Samsung Omnia, for example, challenged viewers to figure out how they created an optical illusion with a HD 18910 camera, and Tiger Woods actually walked on water after a gamer revealed a glitch that let the Woods avatar take a shot on water in the video game Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08.

But nothing compares to this new move by Old Spice. “I think we're going to see a lot of brands trying to figure out how they can take advantage of this new idea. . . of responding to users in real time,” Fiorentino says.

Mark Federman, a researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, says the campaign's success boils down to “just a very, very simple idea.”

“We collectively in our society like good storytelling. We like cleverness. We like unusual humour and we like humour juxtaposed with surreality.”

Federman says the campaign started with a great traditional commercial, but then let social media do precisely what social media does best. “Social media is not about broadcasting a message, it's about connecting people,” he says.

Rather than trying to further broadcast the messages through social media, Old Spice let people connect person to person, creating a sense of intimacy between the character and his millions of viewers — even if for those who didn't receive a personalized response themselves.

It remains to be seen how much this innovative campaign will boost sales of Old Spice and help the company appeal to a younger demographic, but Bagley is certain his client is “smiling.”

And for now, as he announced on Wednesday, Old Spice guy must ride his “jet-ski lion” into the sunset.

Viral videos in a day

Within 24 hours, views of the Old Spice guy's responses eclipsed some of the most popular viral videos to date (also based on the first 24 hours)

Old Spice responses to viewers: 5.9 million

Barack Obama's victory speech: 4.8 million

George W. Bush dodging shoes: 4.4 million

Susan Boyle: 3 million

Old Spice Guy says

Tweep GeorgeGSmithJr is “a man that deserves to be taken as seriously as a heart attack suffered while piloting a zeppelin over a bacon factory. Which is the most serious of heart attacks, because if that zeppelin crashes into that bacon factory, all of us will be without bacon. And that simply will not do.”

To Jose Alejandro Montero, who asks, “Can you die?”

“I promise when I do it will be a glorious display of fireworks, bagpipe band music and the unexplained firing of every single firearm in the entire world simultaneously.”

To Iggip0p, who asks, “What is the manliness thing you've ever done?”

“Probably the time I sprinted the summit of Mount Fuji with both my ankles snared in bear traps. No. It was probably when I wheelied my motorcycle for 10,000 consecutive kilometres on my way to Mount Fuji. Nevermind. I'm pretty sure it was the night before that, when I ripped off the metal siding on my house and used it to forge that motorcycle with my bare hands. While I was asleep. That was probably it.”