If you haven’t heard about the Old Spice video campaigns you must be either living under a rock or rendered speechless by Isaiah Mustafa’s six-pack, towel wearing bod. Some say he’s a god. I say the campaign is brilliant (and happen to concur with the god-like references). Weiden + Kennedy, P&G’s ad agency, pulled together one of the most integrated and truly buzz worthy social media campaigns of 2010. Their timeliness, randomness, and honest-to-goodness humor has put Old Spice on the map in terms of social media. Instead of me gushing about it, feel free to read the great articles by Mashable and Fast Company. But of course my $0.02 anyway.
As I thought about what worked so well in this campaign, I kept thinking about the 4Ps of marketing and how, in this new social media world, we need a new P. Sure, every successful marketing mix has something to do with product, price, placement and promotion. But what they don’t teach you is what we learned this week about a healthy dash of social media and a heaping helping of a hot guy in a towel.
As marketers, we spend most of our time cooking up clever ways to share our brand with the people we think are most interested – a.k.a. our target audience. Whether it’s chocolates, cars, ShamWows or Forex – there’s a buyer for what we’re selling. They just don’t know it yet.
Brands have to work harder than ever to earn our attention. We’ve all heard the urban legend of the viral video that refused to produce the golden YouTube views and its silent death at the hands of its maker. Tragic. We’ve all seen the Facebook pages that vie for us to like them only to disappoint us and the Twitter streams that offer nothing of value in 140 characters or less. Sigh.
The great thing about the Old Spice campaign is that it took something that’s been around for decades (my grandpa wore it for years) and made it new by starting with fans and followers. It is what every good campaign should do – start with the people and let them build it. It’s something they don’t teach you in school but something I admire in practice. IMHO, People should be the 5th P. Think about it. Social media is all about People. It’s about engaging People in conversations, creating new ideas, forming and sharing opinions and connecting. These are People who may or may not like your brand. But, they know other People. And when they see and hear cool stuff in action, they tell them.
Hats off to W+K for focusing on the People and to Old Spice taking a risk and putting a hot guy in a towel (seriously, thank you.) And because I work for Currensee, a social network where we admire great examples like this one…AND because we are a little goo-goo for social media, we decided to ask (and by ask I mean, make) one of our interns, appropriately named Orli, respond to one of the Old Spice commercials. Watch the original here. Then watch Orli’s response.