Old Spice Man = Social Media Genius

I wish this had been done in time to be entered in the Corp Comms’ Digi Awards for best Digital Campaign because it was pure and utter genius. No idea what I am talking about? Saw it in the paper and haven’t seen the videos, or just caught a glimpse on Twitter earlier in the week and didn’t stop to check?

Or maybe you ARE one of the 5,776,595 peeps who have already viewed The Shirtless Old Spice Man channel on YouTube, where Isaiah Mustafa, former footballer, who first came to notice online in February with a Wieden+Kennedy-produced video commercial, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”, became Social Media Man of the Moment this week with a series of hilarious and deadpan video answers to celebrity and ordinary tweeters.

And yes, all with his shirt off.

Have I got the voicemail? God yes, who wouldn’t?!

And you can too because the inspired Reddit community joined forces to build a tool that will (in seconds) let anyone take snippets of the original audio to create your own voicemail message.

There are many more brilliant video answers on Old Spice’s YouTube channel, and the huge and worldwide ‘feelgood’ response is very important as a lesson in how a PR and social media marketing campaign SHOULD be done.

What made this campaign so successful?

The campaign was feelgood and interactive, and didn’t ask anything in return.

1. Old Spice got an gorgeous actor to talk into the camera all day without his shirt on. It did it for me.
2. He did a video answer to a few celebrities, who Tweeted it out to their followers, which meant other celebrities starting lining up to get in on the act, and each of them told their millions of Twitter followers all about it. And then everyone started tweeting. Utter genius.
3. The videos were dead-dead funny, and short – under a minute in length – key to successful use of YouTube.
4. The agency did their homework and targeted major Twitter players, and then just let it grow organically through those key influencers – there were no press releases or conferences.

Wieden+Kennedy the PR firm that put together this campaign quote the following stats for the first day of the campaign:

So, all power to The Old Spice Guy. Come back soon, and bring a few awards for  Wieden+Kennedy with you.