Here is an example of how a brand considered relatively outdated can turn things around by launching a successful (and hilarious) social media campaign.
Actor Isaac Mustafa posed as the shirtless ‘Old Spice Guy’, originally for this ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ commercial (which scored close to 19 million views across all video viewing platforms). Wieden + Kennedy then took this campaign a step further into the online world, by making personalized short videos for Twitter and blog fans (sometimes celebrities) as a response to tweets and questions addressed to the Old Spice Guy. The results were pure magic, mostly because of the real time posting of the response videos, the excellent engagement achieved with Old Spice Guy fans and a great sense of humor.
In terms of numbers, 180+ short videos featuring the Old Spice Guy scored 5.9 million views, 22,500 comments, with practically all online impressions being positive and that’s just for the period of 13-16 July (source: Mashable). The campaign has (sadly) now ended but it still enjoys the worldwide ripple effect of its escalating popularity.
My personal favorite is this response to George Stephanopoulos with some tips for Obama to gain more female popularity.
As a by-product of this campaign, an Old Spice Guy voicemail generator was created by Nelson Abalos Jr, for Old Spice Guy fans to create a personalized voicemail message, worth checking out.
Additional Resources:
You can view all of the Old Spice Guy videos at the Old Spice YouTube Channel.
For the Top 10 funniest Old Spice Guy response videos, click here.
By pretty much every metric (accept sales where the data is yet to be released) the campaign was a huge success. The question becomes how do small and mid size companies do something similar without the budget of Old Spice. Here is one idea, http://bit.ly/bCxs72.