Best Use Of Social Media In An Ad Campaign Ever? Old Spice Personalized Videos

Advertising July 13, 2010 12 Comments

In the old days (only a couple of years ago) advertising was pretty easy…you spent lots of money, bought the best slots, got great creative and people generally bought more of your product. Things have moved on slightly and the smart advertisers and agencies are creating multi platform campaigns that have social media elements built in to them. It’s not enough to just add a Facebook URL to the end of an advert and hope to get 1000s of new likes (that never worked anyway!), you really need to be a lot more creative than that and that is exactly what Old Spice have done with a simple genius campaign. They have taken the hugely popular advert that they created for TV and added some incredibly smart online elements that are seeing the adverts blow up across social media channels as I write this. There is no doubt that this will be the most talked about ad campaign of recent times…

The Brilliant Original Advert

The key here is that the original advert was very good, it stood up on it’s own as a great piece of creative content and was shared all over the internet and had semi-cult status. For those of you not familiar with the advert here is one of the examples but there are lots more versions and copy cats to be found on Youtube. With 12 million views on it’s own this advert was off to the perfect start…

The Moment Of Genius

Instead of just leaving it there and lapping up the praise that was coming their way the agency went out and added a strong social media element to the advert that took things to the next level…The personalized advert. Using a simple green screen and the same actor they targeted some of the best known “internet celebrities” and made personalized videos for them. Appealing to the ego of users (and this doesn’t just apply to celebrities but to all internet users) they knew that they had created something that would spread even further. Here are some of the videos that they created…

Kevin Rose

One of the best known users of twitter and founder of Digg Kevin Rose got a personalized message from “The Old Spice” guy wishing him all the best and a speedy recovery (Kevin had said on Twitter he was poorly). Kevin of course tweeted the video to over 1 million followers and it is trending on Digg a site which will send 100,000s of views to the videos.

Perez Hilton

Perez is one of the biggest bloggers in the world with his trashy celeb talk attracting millions of readers per day. The Old Spice man personalized a message to him in the following video knowing full well that Perez would share the video and pass it on to his readers who would then retweet and share it all over the internet.

Complete Social Media Package

They really are not going to leave any stone uncovered with this campaign as “The Old Spice Guy” also has his own Twitter account and is taking requests from normal punters for more personalized videos. Although the general public will have their requests answered I would imagine he will focus mostly on large blogs who want to have their ego’s stroked by having their own video produced further increasing the virality of the campaign. The last hook for this is that they are using Twitter’s promoted Tweets service to make sure that this gets out to as big an audience as possible which I have to say is another stroke of pure genius! I really do have to say that although this is early days it has to be one of the most innovative campaigns that I have ever seen and will get huge buzz in the coming days. I think we can kick Alexander the Meerkat in to touch as the best use of social media in an ad campaign to date and we now all have a new campaign to gush over. Simply Amazing work!

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