Thursday, August 19, 2010

Who Remembers What All That Old Spice Hype Was About?


I couldn't load this story from the source PR Squared, so I am reposting it here.  I want to share with you what we know now that we didn't know before. We all remember the Old Spice tweets last week.  Here are some of the results.

The hilarious Old Spice campaign from 2 weeks ago rightfully caused a viral stir.  The project was funny and well-executed.  Whether or not the brand’s sales rise remains to be seen, but my guess is that, to most marketers, it won’t matter: they’ll press their agencies to “do something as cool as the Old Spice campaign” whether it passes the ROI test or not.
Two things occured to me during the campaign.
#1 was that consumers LOVED the fact that the brand’s spokesman interacted with them directly.  This “1:1:many” approach has long been touted as one of the key benefits of Social Media Marketing, and it was writ large via Old Spice.  I say “1:1:many” to denote that the interactions with the spokesman were 1:1, but the dialogue was performed in public, thus the “many” (and thus, the outsized credit attributed to the responses).
This “customization as performance” model is sure to strike many as the Next Big Thing in Marketing, despite the fact that it’s been done in smallball fashion via the public-facing Customer Service efforts of brands like Comcast, Dell, etc.
#2 was a caution: what happens in public can be derailed in public. 
As I tweeted about during the campaign, actress Alyssa Milano’s public challenge to Old Spice to donate $100K to Gulf Cleanup efforts went unanswered.  The challenge was covered in high-profile outlets like the Huffington Post, and still went unanswered… To date, no one seems very interested in helping Ms. Milano’s challenge go viral, but, one can easily imagine how a fun campaign like Old Spice’s could get caught up in an unforseen imbroglio that destroyed all that newfound goodwill!

Welcome to the future. It won’t always smell as good as Old Spice.

Originally posted by Todd Defren