The New Thinking Behind the Old Spice Viral Campaign

Bravo, Old Spice.  Bravo.  Your viral ad campaign featuring Isaiah Mustafa is one of the most brilliant social media-based advertising campaigns that I’ve ever seen. It is certain to become a case study in how to effectively reach huge numbers of people.

How many people?  Let’s recap now that one week has gone by since Old Spice started posting videos on July 12.  I calculated the total number of views the campaign had received by adding the “Views” figure displayed publicly for each video to find the sum for all of the videos in the effort.  As of 6:45 PM EST on Monday, July 19th, videos categorized under Old Spice’s “Responses” playlist had received a staggering 36,229,190 views.

Let’s put those numbers in perspective.  36,229,190 views since the campaign started on July 12th is:

• 517,559 views a day, 21,564 views an hour, 359 views a minute, or about 6 views per second for a solid week.
• 85 times the number of views of Sarah Palin’s YouTube videos; 8,320,523 more views than John McCain’s YouTube videos; and only slightly less than 25 percent of the total number of views of Barack Obama’s videos.  As a note of clarification, we’re talking about views of the videos themselves.  YouTube refers to this number as “Total Upload Views.”
• If we figure the videos average about 30 seconds each, it totals 301,909 hours, 12,579 days, or 34 years and change of viewing.

Like I said, staggering.

How on earth did Old Spice pull this off?  Crystal Borde, in her post on how this campaign might seed ideas for advocacy videos, makes the excellent point that Old Spice took care to target influential accounts on Twitter.  But on a bigger picture scale, Old Spice recognized the value of integrating their traditional and online campaigns to maximize impact.

In Crystal’s post, she linked to the ReadWriteWeb post on how the videos were made.  That article links to this blog post by Mark Borden, who interviewed Wieden+Kennedy’s Iain Tait for Fast Company.  The entire interview provides a great analysis of the project,  but this response in particular stuck out to me:

One of the unique things taking place in the studio is we have a team of social media people, we have the Old Spice community manager, we have a social media strategist, a couple of technical people, and a producer. And we’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally-relevant community.

It’s not just picking people with huge followings, it’s a really interesting combination.

Here we see the true spirit of integration that made this campaign the overwhelming success that it is.  Social media experts, creative experts, technical experts and producers were all working together to make a product in real-time that supported the overall goals of their client, and stayed true to Old Spice’s brand and message.  What’s more, the team put strategic thinking into their online outreach decisions – just as you would for any traditional outreach campaign – to ensure that their efforts would impact as many people as possible.  They took a long-established brand and a relatively new advertising campaign and adapted it to make it compatable with an emerging medium. All while staying true to Old Spice’s overall marketing and communications goals.  It is worth noting that this was a campaign that was taken very seriously, and involved substantial investment of time and resources.  While not as expensive as say, a Super Bowl spot, it demanded time commitments from a broad team, extensive strategic planning and investment in the medium.

Old Spice and Wieden+Kennedy, again, bravo.  You’ve set a pristine example for communicators everywhere on how online efforts can inform, support and enhance traditional outreach strategies – and vice versa.