Old Spice, a body wash for men created a social media campaign in 2010 using a ‘ladies man’ and former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa which was based around the videos uploaded to YouTube (which was also shown on Television). The Old Spice campaign has proven to be one of the most memorable creative marketing and advertising concepts ever executed. It has longevity and endurance that has been achieved through a mix of several replications as well as using online and offline integration in the campaign, social media and PR that has kept the original content bubbling across the Web.
The campaign had astounding success! It was the number one most viewed sponsored channel on YouTube with 236 million YouTube Views, 80,000 Twitter followers in 2 days and Facebook Interaction increased 800% with the personalised videos (Fans now total over 1.5 million). Sales figures increased by 107%, which is a great result. At the end of the day you can have all the noise and buzz around your brand, but if Old Spice didn’t achieve increased sales for this product then it really would have been a waste of time.
Jeff Bullas, a very powerful and successful Social media consultant, assessed the campaign and suggests that there are 11 things that we can all learn from this social media campaign:
- Keep videos short and snappy
- Turn your content into something that is easy to share
- Make your marketing content searchable
- Be everywhere
- Respond in real time
- Use other peoples and other medias networks (often for free in this space)
- Use social media to activate mass media
- Keep to the content coming
- Drive engagement through personalisation
- If it works then keep repeating a proven formula
- Add a negative twist: Old Spice added Fabio as a rivalling “new old spice guy”