My grandpa was an Old Spice guy, my dad is too. And if you listened to my new BlackBerry ringtone, you’d think I was a third-generation Old Spicer.
Well, I’m not – yet. But that hasn’t kept me from appreciating the recent branding effort of this 70-year-old hygiene product. It still smells musty, yet there’s something refreshing in the air for Old Spice.
It all started one fateful day in February
Say what you will about Super Bowl TV ads and the ridiculous cost for one :30 second spot (over $3.5 million at last check). But when done right, they can offer significant impact.
Remember the first year GoDaddy ran a spot during the NFL’s championship game? The number of viewers scrambling to visit the company online caused a bigger crash than Danica Patrick at Daytona. And GoDaddy is a web hosting company.
At that moment, the Old Spice Guy deep-sixed any memory of the poor 1960s-70s boat captain spokes-model.
More significantly, Old Spice has enjoyed improved sales overall. According to Advertising Age, the Proctor & Gamble Co. brand has been consistently gaining market share, enough to erase a deficit built up over the past.
And though it’s hard to measure the hard dollar sales results of Old Spice Guy, one cannot ignore his impact.
Sweet smell of success
This is especially true online, where the campaign has gone viral.
Unless you’ve unplugged yourself from the digital world, you’ve probably heard about the Old Spice Guy’s 186 highly publicized videos released in early July. These videos, developed in response to people who sent in requests through Twitter, generated more than 34 million aggregate views and a billion PR impressions in a week, according to P&G.
In the six days following the start of Old Spice Guy’s personalized videos, he reached more than 100 million followers. And as of July 18, Old Spice had become the No. 1 all-time-most-viewed sponsored channel on YouTube.
Old Spice’s Twitter account @OldSpice has blown up to include more than 80,000 followers. And its Facebook fan base has grown to 630,000, with fan interaction jumping 800% since the launch of the personalized videos.
Even OldSpice.com has seen its traffic levels spike by 300%, though I’m not sure who else besides me has downloaded the free ringtone.
So what can we learn from an Old Spice Guy?
“Social media for the moment isn’t really about traditional metrics; those are on the way, no doubt, but right now it’s more about customer engagement and awareness – the opportunity for consumers to talk directly to the Old Spice Guy, and have him talk directly to them,” says Renay San Miguel of TechNewsWorld.
I agree. Old Spice is a great example of an established brand boldly going into unchartered waters to reinvent its image.
They understand that social media is changing the world of advertising as many of us know it. No longer do companies control the discussion. More and more consumers want to be entertained. And they want to interact.
To take advantage of this burgeoning two-way communication, companies must get beyond the confines of ROI. New media has blurred the direct connection between marketing and sales. And though companies still need to sell stuff in order to remain in business, they must find ways to do so while developing relationships with their customers along the way.
Looking for a refreshing approach to your marketing? The “Adholics” can provide a number of traditional and new media solutions that meet your needs.
“My diaper is full; full of chic” is the opening line of what turns out to be a 30 second homage to potty humor.
And I loved every last second of it.
Is my maturity level showing by admitting this or can we all agree that this new Huggies denim campaign is incredible.
Where did they find that baby?
How did they get him to turn and stare like that?
Has that child always been so full of himself or did those incredibly cool denim print diapers give him that confidence?
The cool factor in this marketing campaign convinced me that I just had to buy these diapers for my little guy even though for the same money I could have had 20 more plain white Huggies.
That’s like 4 days worth of diapers I sacrificed and I couldn’t care any less, those diapers are hilarious. Give him a white shirt and he’s a little rebel without a pacifier.
I’m just glad Huggies has always been open to having a sense of humor about their products, I mean doesn’t the nature of the product beg for some comedy? This isn’t their first foray into this arena, they have had some great laughs over the years. But now this funny baby thing is really catching on making the last couple of years pretty lucrative for the Baby Actors Guild. You just can’t fake the charm, non-intimidation and cutesy factor babies offer.
Who doesn’t trust babies? If a baby tries to sell you something you listen right?
Plus, Babies have one huge added bonus right now, you can put their face all over your product without ever having to worry about your spokesperson pulling a “Tiger”.
So, while we are on the subject of babies in marketing, I thought I’d offer up a batch of some of my favorite ads featuring our favorite little munchkins.
E*Trade (any and all of these are great, here’s a compilation)
Huggies “I poo in blue” Denim Diapers
Huggies Little Movers “Scoop on Droop”
Evian bottled water (did you know Evian is Naïve spelled backwards?) Reality Bites reference
Its amazing to see how social media has so quickly transformed the marketing world, not to mention the realm of advertising and public relations. We went from talking about how to build a Twitter account a few years ago to now expecting social media to do some heavy lifting.
And much of that heavy lifting is in the form of data collection based on online discussions and engagement. Companies are trying to keep up with these emerging social interactions by monitoring what is being said about them online but can’t seem to grapple with the fire hose of data that is coming at them. Most of them are just trying to make sense of properly engage customers and haven’t quite figured out how to use the information that is coming back at them.
From what I see, most companies, not named Ford or Dell, are still hesitant to really embrace social technologies and aren’t quite convinced of its relevance to their business. Either that, or they haven’t the faintest idea how to craft and implement a strategy that incorporates branding, business lead generation, quality customer service, and consumer insight.
Many companies these days have a social media presence but they aren’t really tying it to their overall business objectives. Its just hanging out there on its own. They throw up a Facebook page or sign up for a Twitter account but don’t really have a strategy on how they engage with people or what type of data they hope to glean out of social interactions.
Without any prompting, customers are openly sharing information that would otherwise have taken months of surveys and focus groups. And they’re doing it for free. This has prompted the growth of a relatively new field called Social Intelligence, which harnesses the insights found within social media data to better understand customers and inform marketing and business strategy.
Social Intelligence is quite an easy concept but one that isn’t being fully utilized by most companies. It involves these three basic steps:
Monitoring social media
Collecting and analyzing the content
Using the insights to inform your strategy
Companies are just beginning to figure out the first two steps but have yet to figure out the third and, what I’d consider to be, the most crucial step. Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst at Forrester Research recently published an article called Defining Social Intelligence which he encouraged companies to start taking online conversations seriously to better utilize the data coming from their social channels.
I think Zach and Forrester are on to something. Thus, you should be seeing more and more demand for services that link social data to business insights.
Here are some interesting articles I’ve found on the subject:
I know, I know, all this technology talk; but it really is shaping the marketing industry.
Andy Warhol once said, “in the future everyone will have 15 minutes of fame”. Had he known the Internet was coming, he may have given us all a couple more minutes.
Many companies over the last couple of years have been embracing their customers’ knowledge of technology and soliciting them to produce homemade viral videos or commercials to sell their products for them.
Genius!
With Tivo coming almost standard with cable service these days, who has time for commercials anymore?
Unless you can watch them on YouTube! In which case, it is a welcome break in anyone’s day.
We all need a good laugh every once and awhile, watching a kid shoot deodorant, full court shot, through a basketball hoop is just a good time.
Old Spice asked customers to participate in a contest to best show how much Swagger they have in a viral video, not sure what the winner gets, but I don’t think that’s really why people participate. Everybody has a video camera and editing software these days, just ask them to direct and produce a video for you and they can’t sign up fast enough.
They might be the next Internet sensation!
But the Old Spice Swaggerize campaign was really first inspired by the uncrowned kings of viral video marketing, the geniuses’ at Doritos. For the last 3 Superbowls, viewers have been a part of history as submitted videos of their products are aired during the actual game. The winner here gets 1 million dollars!
His video has been viewed over 52 million times on YouTube, and that doesn’t count the airplay it has received on morning talk shows across the country.
Even better; now they are selling “David after dentist” shirts.
It’s the new way to put a kid through college. (in all fairness, they do claim to donate a portion to operation smile)
You know you want that shirt.
These are just a few of the many examples of viral marketing on the web. Look into this, see what companies like yours are doing, maybe this is something your company should embrace as well?
It’s the start of the week; everyone has settled back into his or her cubes and in-between working is most likely daydreaming of some of their favorite shows that will appear this week (unless the Olympics interrupts). Within those shows, you may or may not notice what has become a huge marketing opportunity, product placement.
This is not “The Home Depot” branded Nascar, that is an endorsement.
This is cleverly inserting products into the lives of sitcom, talk-show, broadcast radio and reality shows to subconsciously get viewers to “buy in” to the lifestyle. You trust these actors, dj’s, celebrities right? Don’t you want to use the products they use?
Product Placement can be as subtle as Vitamin Water in the fridge of a celebrities house in MTV Cribz, or Frasier’s BMW, or those ever present Coca-Cola glasses on the American Idols judging desk.
Don’t forget Chelsea Lately’s recent switch from Grey Goose to Belvedere Vodka. Do you really think that her Vodka taste changed?
But it can also be in-your-face obnoxious, as you will see if you watch NBC’s Biggest Loser. In my house, we play a game similar to slug bug, minus the hitting! We see who can be the first to spot the setup for the minute-long product endorsement where the trainers talk about “how good this xyz product smoothie is” or how “starting your day with xyz’s breakfast bar will give you the energy you need to power through your workout”.
Do both work?
Absolutely.
Do I think one works better?
Definitely.
My opinion, and this is just my opinion, is that the subtler the better.
Frazier was a rich successful single man that worked 2 hours a day, wore the finest suits and drove the shiniest BMW’s.
It’s the American Dream!
Watching his show, you aspire to get to that level where you could one day have those things. But had he looked at the camera every time he sunk into his leather upholstery and said “Ooh, nothing better than a BMW” you may not have been so impressed.
No matter how you do it, if you have a product that can fit into this model, I would say go for it.
And don’t overlook social media marketing for this either. A more recent way to place products is having them endorsed on Twitter by celebrities. The Kardashians have Quick Trim and Carls Jr. (what a combo) and P Diddy has Ciroc Vodka. If you follow either of these people (god help you if you do) you will get incessant reminders from them to purchase these products. Not to say that they don’t in-fact love and use these products, but they do get paid by-the-tweet, so take it for what it is.
Either way, the point is reaching your audience where they are, and this is one way that has proven to work.
Now if Red Bull could just get Apolo Ohno to skate over to his manager holding his celebratory can after his next medal winning race, that would be perfect.
Oh wait; I think Gatorade already has this placement taken.
My grandpa was an Old Spice guy, my dad is too. And if you listened to my new BlackBerry ringtone, you’d think I was a third-generation Old Spicer.
