Look at these social media results, now back at me, now back at the results
No longer is Old Spice Man, as Mustafa is now widely referred to, talking to himself. Now he’s talking to his fans in real-time (well, as real-time as a video response can get without a live link) and answering questions raised via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
This is how agency Weiden + Kennedy have taken the Proctor & Gamble brand campaign to the next level.
Starting last Monday for twelve hours a day over three days, a team of 35 people, including “digital community managers” and three writers, collaborated to encourage and collect fan questions. Video responses were then produced and aired online as quickly as possible. The questions were answered by Old Spice Man in his usual witty and uber-confident manner.
In the week since the Old Spice Responses campaign began, the team posted 183 individual video responses on the Old Spice “I’m on an Internet” YouTube channel which have attracted over 35.7 million unique views. In fact, the Old Spice channel was the most-visited YouTube channel last week and is now the third most-subscribed channel ever in the site’s “sponsor” category.
“As long as we’ve been measuring online video, we’ve never seen anything quite like the Old Spice Responses campaign. There have been ads that have challenged audiences, Samsung’s YouTube Challenge and Tiger’s Jesus Shot come to mind, but there’s never been a campaign that’s been so personal, so quick, and so prolific,” writes Matt Fiorentino on the Visible Measures blog.
“In fact,” he continues, “Old Spice Responses is one of the fastest growing online video campaigns ever. We took a look at some of the most explosive viral videos we’ve measured, including Bush dodging Iraqi shoes, Obama giving his electoral victory speech, and Susan Boyle, and found that in the first 24 hours, Old Spice Responses outpaces all of them. Now, that’s fast.”
The campaign has also had a substantial effect on the Old Spice Twitter account. The number of Followers rose from last Wednesday’s total of 32,000 to 86,000 at the time of writing.
