Another Lesson From The Old Spice Guy, Maybe Two…

Michael Hedges July 21, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Anytime anything remotely interesting happens with new media, the rush is on to divine some sort of significance. When something quite cool happens media people get excited about being excited. Oh, yes, it’s all very post-modern.

Unless you were in a camping trailer somewhere north of the Artic Circle last week without 3G, the Old Spice guy was the hot buzz rather than the black flies. More than a hundred short clips of a guy wearing a towel beside a shower went viral to reach millions. New media people were happy to herald the three-day event as a triumph of new media advertising.

The three-day viral telethon for Old Spice shower gel, like all good media events, was set-up well. Genius advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy debuted “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign months ago, a spot with American football player Isiah Mustafa featured in the Superbowl broadcast last February. A Cannes International Advertising Festival Grand Prix followed. Old Spice is an old brand owned by Procter and Gamble. The ad guys mission was a bit of a revival.

The creative team at Wieden and Kennedy (W+K) wanted to take advantage of web buzz expected from new Old Spice ads. The last series was a YouTube hit. The idea was to message the Twitteratti and celebrity bloggers then post short, personalized clips back.  

“Once we had the idea and got our client's support, it took the whole Old Spice team to figure it out and pull it off,” said W+K’s Jason Bagley to creativity-online (July 14). Imagine that client meeting! Needed was a team of writers, editors, production crew, digital crew, towel, shower and talent. They would work in real-time.

Targeted would be “influencers” and fans. The ad people could count of people who live by buzz being willing to create some. And they did.

Advertising people around the world picked up on the buzz, that, of course, being their business. “This is not yet the most important marketing phenomenon in the history of the internet, but it could be,” said social media consultant Pierre Le Leannec to France24 (July 14). “They have managed somehow to find the holy grail of personalized marketing by embodying the brand and establishing a special relationship, almost intimate with their audience.”

The viral buzz for the Old Spice guy came as media buyer ZenithOptimedia revised upward, again, its ad spending forecast. Among other happy tidbits – for some – is the outlook for internet ad spending: 17% of all advertising by 2012, just slightly less than the global forecast for newspaper ad spending. Internet video – like the Old Spice guy – will account for one-third of internet ad spending. Social media ads are forecast to grow 30% per year.

The advertising people have clearly fallen in love with new media. Passionate glow was all around at the Cannes ad festival. The Old Spice viral campaign just revs up the juices creatively, so to speak. Old media won’t even get the benefit of a divorce settlement, only banishment. Not to be forgotten is that W+K was totally prepared and prepared totally to take its message to a specific target. And, too, there was significant client support (i.e. money). Taking the Old Spice guy viral may have had the appearance of work on the fly, cheap and quick, but it was not.

Once the Old Spice guy buzz reached a certain volume, other viral message rose. Commentators wanting to camp on to the buzz produced an endless stream referencing the campaign. Everywhere you turned there was another “Lessons for (insert interest here) from the Old Spice guy.” It was as if the entire communications sector, after furious groping, had found a moment of clarity, an answer.

In that, the W+K Old Spice guy viral experiment was parody, of itself and of the media it used. Rather than being real one-to-one communications extolled by social media fans, it was carefully controlled theater. Nothing wrong with that, to be sure; but less an answer to the nagging question than a demonstration of the power of process. The final video summed up perfectly. “I am, ultimately, a ridiculously nice guy,” said the Old Spice guy, ”and I cannot answer everyone.”

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