That Hunky Old Spice Man and Social Media
Everyone recognizes this bottle
Most of my blog readers are busy people who have many more agendas than simply keeping up with the latest and greatest in Social Media. If you are one of these people, this blog’s for you!
Old Spice, which has been around since forever, is a prominent American brand of male grooming products. It is manufactured by Procter & Gamble, which acquired the brand in 1990 from the Shulton Company.
To me, Old Spice was Dad’s smell of choice back in the ’50′s, ’60′s, -( dating myself, dating myself!) although it began manufacturing as far back as 1934. There are a range of products available. Like many well-branded household names, the original packaging is still instantly recognizable, the little nautical background music is iconic, the spicy scent is instantly recognizable and still today Procter & Gamble uses nifty slogans from the past. Old Spice Classic shower gel is sold using the slogan “The original. If your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist.” Gotta love it.
What the heck does Old Spice have to do with leading edge Social Media? For those who don’t know, you have to read on……….
Some very good brains at Procter & Gamble (or perhaps they used an ad agency, not sure) had a steady client base for Old Spice and the original products have been significantly jazzed up to keep up with today’s consumer. But, they wanted to increase their client base and they came up with a brilliant ‘Don’t reinvent the wheel but put it on a different vehicle’ concept. (By the way, I just made up the title of the concept – most marketing people would have a more accurate name)
Old Spice has always been marketed as ‘manly’ – Its a man’s man fragrance and feel and every marketing piece has used this angle. It certainly appeals to woman and men equally. The latest campaign is pure social media genius.
New ads were developed featuring hunky actor Isaiah Mustafa. (swoon, even his name is sexy). They cleverly worked on the concept – directed at women – that if your man used Old Spice like he does, he would shower her with diamonds, ride horses, build kitchens, bake cakes, ride motorcycles, sit in hot tubs, etc. all of which Isaiah is depicted as doing in the commercials. He is mostly bare-chested and the actor is very fit. Ads such as this appeared years earlier with another model but even I am not old enough to recall this clearly.
In addition to obviously running the commerials on TV, a full-out social media campaign was developed with all the commercials on YouTube -
and one or another of the commericals have been tweeted, updated, status updated, and blogged about a billion times. (unscientific data). Mashable would probably know. But here’s the best Social Media part……….
On July 14th 2010 Old Spice set up Isaiah in a bathroom with a Video Camera and had him reply to hundreds of comments and questions that were pouring in via twitter, facebook, reddit and other social network platforms. Within 24 hours there were 181 video replies which had received a total of 6,703,414 views[7], propelling the Old Spice channel[1] up to the most viewed channel of the day.
Imagine! – Having comments left on blogs, websites, Facebook Fan Pages, etc. responded to by video! Genius! Of course not every company has the resources of Procter & Gamble or the services of Isaiah, but its a jim dandy idea nevertheless.
If you can squeeze in a bit of time in your hectic, hectic days, click through to YouTube and watch a few of the commercials. Mr. Mustafa and Proctor & Gamble’s genius will bring a smile (and a sigh ladies) to your day!
If you are REALLY interested, check out a pretty interesting Old Spice background on www.Wikipedia.org or simply type Old Spice into Google. Info EVERYWHERE. I just betcha that sales have gone up at Old Spice.
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