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It Smells Like Social Media

Editor: Ande Gregson Posted: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 Discussion: 4 Comments

Ironically the first Old Spice fragrance was originally designed for women and was only introduced for men in 1937, yet the fragrance has been a prominent male American brand for over 70 years.

Dominated by a nautical theme of sailing ships, clippers and more recently yachts the brand classic buoy shaped design has been a staple product with many famous actors including Bruce Campbell, Neil Patrick Harris and more recently Isaiah Mustafa endorsing it.

And if you are young enough to remember, the original 1970′s Old Spice TV ads featured a surfer risking life and limb to manoeuvre through the wake of huge waves, a glamorous and seductive woman waiting for him back on shore and the thundering voices from “O Fortuna” by Carl Orff.

However, all that changed with the recent social media rebranding campaign that generated over 40 million video views and over 1.4 billion impressions.

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Wieden+Kennedy recently released a case study of the recent Old Spice social media campaign, calling it “the fastest-growing and most popular interactive campaign in history”

Actor Isaiah Mustafa stars in the video as character ‘Old Spice man’, recording and putting out over 200 videos (so far) featuring answers to questions received via social networking channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Digg.

This is a great example of combining traditional TV production methods and realtime social media technologies with a very creative team, one that managed to write nearly 200 ads in 48 hours creating incredibly funny and personalised content.

Questions to Old Spice man came from the general public and well known web personalities including Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Guy Kawasaki and Digg Founder Kevin Rose.

This is will undoubtedly become a referenced case study for how a brands can use social media effectively to engage with fans in entertaining, innovative and realtime way.

Whether this will be a case study that demonstrated real commercial returns is another question; Ad Week reported sales of Old Spice body wash had declined by 7% over the past year.

On the other hand the Wieden+Kennedy are naturally claiming success with a sales increase of 107% within the last month, as to whether this is sustainable that has yet to be seen.

However, if you still yearn to be that surfer with the 70′s lifestyle and side burns you can still experience this on You Tube

http://www.jennalanger.com jennalanger

Thanks for including the 1970s Old Spice commercials. I love that they continue to market Old Spice as the product for “real men.” This new effort tells the same story in a more humorous, interactive, and social way. The medium is the message, but so is the content. Old Spice figured out how to get the two to work together, producing amazing results.
http://www.media140.com AndeGregson

Glad you like the 70′s links, they were such an iconic set of TV commercials, it seems natural that as the technology evolves, so does the way in which we use it to make sometimes more interesting interactive and engaging experiences for consumers.

Having said that, there is still something quite unique and appealing about the 70′s, 30 years on!
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http://www.jmatthicks.com JMattHicks

The humor in these commercials is genius! I have a hard time deciding what’s funniest between Ray Lewis’ “girls want me, guys want to be me, and animals want to learn to talk so they can hang out with me,” or Terry Crews’ “building kick!” Too funny!