Social Media Campaign: Old Spice

The Wieden & Kennedy Old Spice campaign has evolved to dominate discussion in social media, in what is sure to become a very interesting case study.



'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' spot from Wieden + Kennedy Portland was launched in February during the Super Bowl. It featured Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL athlete, being totally awesome and became an almost immediate hit online. It has since racked up almost 13 million views on YouTube, with a couple new iterations launched in recent weeks.

Yesterday, however, the marketing campaign took a different turn and really got proper social media right savvy. It’s been updated and sees Isaiah Mustafa respond directly to YouTube comments, Tweets, Yahoo! Answers and blog posts about him in 117 publicly available, timely and personalised video messages.

To ensure maximum coverage Old Spice replied to some of the most popular personalities on Twitter, such as @Biz (Twitter co-founder), @ryanseacrest (TV personality), @kevinrose (Digg founder), @Alyssa_Milano (actor), and @guykawasaki (social media thought leader).
Blogger Perez Hilton’ s video response has already clocked up over 115k views. They’ve also hit up media outlets like GQ, Huffington Post, Gizmodo and The Ellen Show. Starbucks have even managed to get in on the action.



Is it that simple to use social media effectively?

To be honest, it's not. This campaign again proves the neccesity to get every aspect involved in launching a truly effective social media campaign, and foremost proves that social media are a second phase communication tool, and is many takes mistaken for an initial campaign strategy.