Nothing New about Old Spice

- August 5, 2010 by Kevin Lane

Thanks to its smashing success in popularity and sales, Old Spice’s “Digital Response” social campaign is being lauded by the everyone as the next big advertising model. But when you dig a little deeper, it’s all been done before – just not applied so liberally.

Is answering people’s questions with personalized video responses really anything new? Absolutely not. YouTube stars iJustine, Dan Brown and others have been doing it for years. So why is everyone (and I mean ev-ery-one) drooling over Digital Response, the latest piece of Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign by agency Weiden + Kennedy?

Not because it’s never been done before – in fact, every part of the campaign has been done before. It’s the sum of its parts that makes it groundbreaking. Never before has anyone so intricately and expertly woven together all its elements.

So aside from direct-response videos, what did Old Spice replicate? Real-time response. By responding to questions as soon as they could, the creative team took a page out of Best Buy’s playbook. With Twelpforce (a portmanteau of “Twitter” and “Help Force”), the tech retailer has provided real-time support to customers via Twitter since July of 2009. Real-time response helped the Old Spice campaign become a spectator event, luring viewers to “stay tuned” to the web for up-to-the-minute video posts.

Old Spice also incorporated questions from social media forums across the web – from Facebook to Twitter to Digg to the delightfully obscure 4chan. That way, there was zero barrier to participation (i.e. I don’t have a YouTube account, but I am on Facebook, so I’ll submit a question there). Where have we seen this before? In the sharing dashboard you see at the bottom of web content. That unassuming little bar never struck me as innovative, but when you remember how fragmented the web still is (despite the big players like Facebook and Twitter), it’s imperative to let people interact anywhere/way they want.

And then there’s perhaps the most important element: the campaign’s character. If he weren’t so intriguing, funny and off the wall, no one would have asked, “Can you say my name in a funny way?” And without his bravado, no one would have asked him for his opinion on winning back female voters or to propose to their fiancé. But of course, we’ve seen his style in other brand characters: the mystique of Dos Equis’ The Most Interesting Man in the World; the straight humor of GEICO’s rhetorically questioning spokesman; and the always-shirtlessness of Marky Mark in Calvin Klein ads of yore. What we haven’t seen is the combination of these three that Old Spice gave us in the Old Spice character. (A small combination within a larger one? Totally meta, I know.)

So when we take a step back, this “innovative” Old Spice campaign didn’t really break any new ground. It just fluidly meshed a bunch of previously fragmented pieces. It also spiked sales by 107% in the last month, according to Nielsen. What old elements can you tie together to create something fresh?

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