Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

The recent positive sales results related to the Old Spice Guy campaign not only tell us that guys everywhere are smelling better, but that being able to consider how a character in a television ad responds to consumers on the internets can be wildly successful. I can’t think of many examples of an agency for one of the big CPGs being able to react so quickly and fluidly to it’s audience. It’s a great feat for Wieden + Kennedy, and kudos needs to go to them for reacting with a very, well, small digital agency nimbleness.

Yes, everyone is talking about it, but at the risk of exhaustion, let’s break it down. A simple and humorous television ad with actor Isaiah Mustafa asks, “does your man smell like me?” The ad itself was brilliant, for it’s use of great special effects as much as it’s quirky copywriting. With the ad’s success, (which definitely would have been a Top 10 on AdCritic.com), the ad of course went viral on YouTube. Wieden + Kennedy immediately reacted by placing the content on Old Spice’s existing YouTube channel. From there they promoted a “Be My Friend” connection on Facebook. In addition, they created the conversational Twitter feed from Old Spice guy. What’s great is that they responded to comments, via the actual video and physical being of the Old Spice guy. Not a copywriter responding as if he was the guy from the curtain behind the Twitter account, but actually responding with humour and copywriter’s wit on video. Pure advertising awesomeness. A campaign that came alive.

But was this luck or planning?

We recently returned from a series of discussions with clients in New York on the exhaustive topic of social media, and we talked with them about the importance of platform thinking versus campaign thinking alone. The platform means that you first monitor, then participate, then mobilize. The platform means that you have a handle on how to react in the way that this campaign did. The platform is about investing mindshare in social media for the long term. Monitor means watching trends, positive and negative sentiment and knowing where the audience is socially, emotionally and physically. Participate means learning how to enter the conversation sounding like a human being, and not like you’re marketing something. Mobilize means enabling your audience to act.

W+K did all three. And they did it with the creative skillset of the traditional agency combined with an agility and understanding of the digital channel. The win? They created the great ironic soapbox salesman, and they had listened and monitored enough in the social channel to know how to make the conversation work. Think about how easy it would be for the campaign to fail. The character could have come across as cheesy, irrelevant or salesy. None of these things happened. The social channel conversation from the OS guy was relevant, authentic to the character and insightful, for example, to the playfulness with women, which the original ad spoke to. “JS Beals writes, can you ask my girlfriend to marry me?,” he says with all of his best musty Old Spice baritone reacting via the Twitter feed. Smartly, he responded to popular online celebs like Perez Hilton and Alyssa Milano. Ironically, Axe laid the ground for the success of the quirky and humorous irony that the Old Spice guy kinda now owns. Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

Ask me about how we have succeeded in this platform approach with creating positive and profitable success through social shopping, enabling one client to become the largest seller of eyeglasses online,  and creating a mobilization social movement for another client through social media through that drove significant awareness and high engagement.

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