The Cutting Edge Of Social Media Marketing With The Old Spice Man

By: Chris Cox Date Posted: July 20, 2010

The Old Spice Man is the cutting edge of social media marketing...

This, my friends, is the cutting edge of social media marketing. Nobody’s ever dared to do this before. At least no big brand has anyway.

(UPDATE: Over the past three months, sales jumped 55 percent and in the past month, they rose 107 percent, also per Nielsen. )

Here’s how Old Spice got millions of views on their videos and commercials (that’s the really astonishing part) in just one day… (and let me know how you think you could use this as a musician in the comments).

Old Spice got a team together of creatives and social media people, and they started filming early in the morning. By that evening, they’d made 87 videos. Each ±7 mins. They made more the next day — and reports were, the team couldn’t get enough of it, it was such a thrill!

Instead of just filming bland old commercials (how tired are deodorant commercials – seriously!?), they decided to engage their audience and be relevant and funny. Their target audience was the eccentric, quirky types over on Reddit.com and similar sites (redditors are – and this is a sweeping generalisation – nerdy, quirky, mildly hostile, liberal, and highly opinionated). If they love you, they’ll tell their friends about you, if they hate you, you’ll know about it real quick.

Their character, the Old Spice man, is the manliest man about (watch the video below and feel in awe of his tremendous manliness…).

To get the redditors – and other influential social media types (like Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Kevin Rose) loving, and not hating them, they interacted with them directly. They made “commercials” for individuals!

Sure, they weren’t the same quality as TV commercials. But we’ve been saying that for ages – when it comes to social media, the quality doesn’t have to be insane – it’s about the connection and the content! But what really helped them kill it was that ordinary viewers felt like they “knew” the characters. There was this constant dialogue, back and forth, that was evolving in real time as people sent in questions and opinions and the Old Spice team made videos to answer them.

What made what they were doing so powerful was that this was a rare time that (1) a big brand had spoken to the public one on one, especially on social media like this, and (2) it was a LIVE, ongoing conversation – it happened in real time, with real people’s questions. Then their social media experts obviously just posted the message out there, got in touch with the relevant people and told them to take a look, and got others commenting.

It all took just a few days, it was intense, but they got millions of views – and there were dozens of comments from guys saying “I will never wear anything other than Old Spice again!” – they really, really loved it! In fact, a bunch of them got together, on their own, and set up an Old Spice Man Voicemail site where you can get your own voicemail with the character’s voice.

It’s amazing what you can do when you target the right social media networks and users, talk to them by name, and commit to having a dialogue with them.

Tell me, how could you use this for your marketing and to build a dialogue with your fans?

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