I’m sure by now you’ve seen the Old Spice commercials that have gone viral on the internet.
If not, here is the one that went crazy after it was shown at the Superbowl:
This thing just went mad, and has had over 17 million views alone. The has over 780,000 fans.
The advertisement was regarded as something spectacular in the advertising industry, where the advertisement took the top “grand prix” prize in the Cannes International Advertising Awards out of 3,191 high quality entries.
The actor, Isaiah Mustafa, a former American Football player, has become something of a star and has been doing the talk show rounds. He was deluged with facebook friend invitations after the ad showed.
The ad is amazing for a number of reasons.
The first is the brilliant script.
The advertisement is aimed at women purchasing products for their men. The ad starts with the lines “Look at your man. Now back to me. Now back at your man. Now BACK TO ME. Sadly, he isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady-scented body wash and switched to old spice he could smell like he’s me.” The advertisement very deliberately sets up a difference between their man and the old spice guy.
Second is the frame-breaking. The Old Spice ads always seem to have a frame breaking element, something absurd happens that you just would not expect. In this case the biggest one is at the end: “I’m on a horse!”. This deliberately takes you out of your normal thinking patterns. While you are going “huh?”, it makes the advertisement different and memorable.
Next is the amazing production. The advertisement was shot in one take on location. It took them about 84 takes over 4 days to get it right. And it generated quite a bit of discussion: “is it real, or computer generated?”
One group of internet commentators got disturbed by this question, and sought out the creators of the advertisement at Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Oregon to find their answer. The result is a 20 minute interview with the creators of the advertisement:
I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you the answer!
But what is really amazing about this advertisement is the intelligent social media strategy they pursued. Scott Monty details the campaign:
- First, they showed the advertisement at the superbowl
- Then they placed the ad on YouTube (a platform from which others can share and embed content, like I’m doing here)
- Then they started tweeting and engaging their target market via Twitter
- Then they targeted key influencers and asked them questions across a variety of social media sites and responded to them via videos placed on YouTube with links to them on Twitter – in something close to real time
Wieden + Kennedy’s Global Director, Ian Tait, talks about the strategy they developed and deliberately pursued in .
In particular, the campaign wasn’t restricted to just TV ads, it was pursued in real time in social media such as Twitter and YouTube:
“It’s not just responding to tweets, it’s looking at the environment right now. YouTube is the place where people share video. Twitter is the place where–celebrities dying or whatever it is–those things blow up so quickly. We know we can only run this thing for a short time so Twitter felt like the place to create the explosion.”
They are very strategic about who they respond to:
“One of the unique things taking place in the studio is we have a team of social media people, we have the Old Spice community manager, we have a social media strategist, a couple of technical people, and a producer. And we’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally-relevant community.
It’s not just picking people with huge followings, it’s a really interesting combination.”
The speed of implementation is critical to the strategy:
“Real time is what drives the Internet. New news is what everyone wants to get a hold of. Everyone is a publisher in their own way. Everyone wants to be tweeting or blogging about something that they are first to be in on. What we’ve done here is blur the lines between things that people don’t expect to be able to be done in real time. So that’s the surprise, that “Hang on, you’re producing these things kind of in real time? How on earth are you doing that?” Every time one comes out and nails it again, it’s seen as almost a new piece of news.”
You can access more Old Spice videos from their website.