Using Social Media To Take The ‘Old’ From Old Spice

Situation: Five years ago if you were to ask any male age 18-35 what they thought of Old Spice products, they’d probably tell you something about their grandfathers. Mostly because the scent hadn’t changed much since its introduction in 1934. 56 years later, when Proctor and Gamble acquired the brand they were faced with a unique task of revitalizing its image. Old Spice wasn’t cool. Sure, it was respected amongst gentlemen, but Axe was the product of choice for “guys.” In order to compete, a change needed to be made, and fast.

Solution: Today those 18-35 year old males are singing a different tune. Almost overnight, Old Spice went from grandpa’s scent to hip and that has everything to do with Isaiah Mustafa, the man your man could smell like. In a  brilliant TV commercial, that epitomizes good casting, performance, writing, how’d-they-do-that special effects, and production design, Mustafa addresses the women in the audience encouraging their men to be like him – a mystical/romantic super man. The commercial is charming, funny, and fun to watch.

Coincidentally, the thirty second spot went viral, acquiring 12.9 million views on YoutTbe. Old Spice followed up with another, just as brilliant 30 second ad “Questions” which has received 5.4 million views to date (since being posted on June 29th).

As if word-of-mouth good will wasn’t enough, Old Spice kicked off a series of video replies straight from the Man himself. In what has become a series of 125, Mustafa stands in his signature towel and bathroom responding to Tweets and comments concerning him and the campaign. The video replies range from sixteen seconds to a minute. By replying to elite Twitter members with lots of young followers – including Ashton Kutcher, Perez Hilton, Kevin Rose, G4, Kevin Periera, Ryan Seacrest, the Huffington Post, and even Isaiah Mustafa himself (how meta) – Old Spice encourages the proliferation of their brand. Getting the mega-users and their followers to do the work for them.

But the campaign also targets the little guy. By ratio, Mustafa has sent more replies to the lesser known users than the bigwigs. This of course encourages more people to get involved and send in their questions or comments. Old Spice is also using Facebook and Twitter to respond to people as well. Who knows, maybe he’ll respond to you?

Results: Successful social media campaigns don’t require gigantic production budgets and placement buys. In this case, smart writing, performance, and outreach sold the product. Besides the aforementioned millions of views, the new video replies campaign has garnered tens of thousands of hits each, some reaching into the hundreds of thousands. Multiply that by 125. And that’s been in just one day, the campaign is currently ongoing. With a clever ad and spokesman, Old Spice was able to change their image and with a strategic call and answer series they were able to get it out wide and fast.

Tagged as: commercial, Isaiah Mustafa, Old Spice, Social Media, Web video