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Best Use Of Social Media In An Ad Campaign Ever? Old Spice Personalized Videos
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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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Wonder how long that tactic will work though. Wont celeb bloggers start to feel used at some point!?
Yeah I think you have a very good point. The lure of getting your own personalized advert made and the hype that goes with it will last a good few days. Even doing it for the ordinary punters will be cool. He is literally standing in front of a green screen doing it so not massive costs or anything involved. Churn out a couple of hundred and job done and move on to their next smart idea!
It seems like this format of doing a series of great commercials specifically targeted at a demographic/need then following it up with a way for the target audience to interact (whether thats videos or another kind of response) with the brand could be a great bridge between traditional and social media. Instead of just prompting the audience to, “connect with us” they can target specific groups of people and have a team of experts to answer questions and engage… Several companies are attempting to do versions of that but I don’t feel like to that extent.
I love these adverts and reaching out to key influencers online with personalised ads is a great way to milk a great concept for all it’s worth. I think Leon makes a valid point though – this now puts the emphasis back on marketers to come up with new and creative ways to engage with bloggers and influencers as churning out the same strategy with a different ribbon on it won’t get them to raise an eyebrow. But isn’t that always the case? Someone does something very clever, others imitate without the same success, someone finds a new way to grab consumer’s attention, and the cycle continues.
I love this campaign, the funniest I’ve ever seen. A great way to wipe out the way Old Spice is seen due to its previous identity.
[...] Best Use Of Social Media In An Ad Campaign Ever? Old Spice Personalized Videos (simplyzesty.com) [...]
This is very funny work and I voted with my wallet tonight. I actually bought Old Spice for the first time in my life. I wonder how many agencies and creative people will now play follow the leader. The bar has been set, just do something as original and clever people.
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