The premise of the campaign is simple. Someone posts a comment, request, or question and the Old Spice man responds. The success and strategy however is complex. With a team of social, creative, and technical minds, coupled with complete freedom, the campaign was able to launch to new levels never seen in social media before.

By activating the already cultivated Old Spice community, distributing real time video content, and seeding responses to key influencers across the internet, Old Spice was able to take a simple conversation to new heights. The campaign itself is not a social phenomenon but a succession in an ongoing social strategy. Below is a summary of the campaign, how they got here, and why it was so popular.

What is it?

Old Spice has created a 2 day campaign that amassed over 180 videos in response to requests and questions from the Old Spice Social Community. Old Spice monitored internet comments to create a video response for as well as opened up for questions and requests from their fans, followers, and friends to have the “Old Spice Man” create a video response. Once the response was filmed, edited, and completed (which took a matter of minutes), the Old Spice Social Media team created strategies to distribute the response and video across the internet by activating their robust social media community.

How it Worked

The Old Spice Social, Creative, and Technical team worked together to develop, create, and distribute the content that has taken the social world by storm. They worked in concert on the following Tasks.

Social:
Identified comments to respond to: The social team scanned the internet as well as their own social and digital properties for relevant comments, questions, and requests that aligned with the brand/campaign positioning. A major influence for this strategy was identifying the influence of the commenter, friend, or follower. By identifying key influencers to respond to, they increased their chances for distribution success.

Distributed content where relevant: Once the comment was identified and the video response was ready for distribution, the social team created “real-time” strategies to distribute the video content where it had the most chance of being shared and distributed. By integrating the Old Spice social properties with the influencers and distribution channels, the social media team was able to create virility through multiple relevant touchpoints.

Creative:
Crafted branded responses: The popularity of the Old Spice man began before this campaign through other TVCs and online videos; the community knew who he was and what he stood for. With that being said, the creative team had to craft short responses that aligned, not only with the brand character, but also with the voice of the comment, request, or question.

Technical:
Fast turnaround: The success of this campaign relied heavily on the ability to find a comment, craft a response, shoot and edit the video, and distribute it in almost real time. The technical team worked consistently to edit the video and ensure it was shareable in a matter of minutes.

Why it worked

This Old Spice campaign worked for several different reasons. They have slowly built their brand to be in position to pull off such a huge viral and social success. The pieces were in place and the community was nurtured to a point for campaign activation. Below are the key factors for the tremendous success this campaign had:

Community: Old Spice has built a solid social following and community. With a robust Facebook page, an active Twitter account, and a highly trafficked YouTube channel, Old Spice has been able to create a culture of virility and conversation prior to the campaign.

The success was derived from the activation of those relationships to engage in the campaign and distribute the videos to and through their community.

Real Time: The video responses were practically distributed in real time. The social space has created a need for real time, individualized communication. This campaign fulfilled that need by having such a fast turnaround.

Format: It’s one thing to craft a text response in the voice of the Old Spice man; it’s another to create video responses. Video has long been the most shared format on social media. Allowing for more engagement and interaction, the Old Spice social team decided to use video to drive distribution.

Freedom: The social team was given a tremendous amount of flexibility from the brand to create the real time videos and distribute socially. This action displayed a level of bravery on the part of the brand to allow the social team full freedom for the success (or potential failure) of the campaign. However, the social team was provided with a set of guidelines and guardrails to stay inside while making the responses and distributing them.

Success

The campaign, although short-lived, showed tremendous results.

Twitter: Old Spice added tens of thousands of Followers

YouTube: The video responses amassed nearly 6 million total views within the first 24 hours (more than President Obama’s victory speech).

Comments: To date the campaign created over 25,000 comments across the internet.

What it Means For Marketers (Key Takeaways)

The combination of brand voice, video format, an active social community, and conversation created a tremendous amount of momentum for the campaign. This shift in what is possible creates some great learnings for marketers.

Community: Having such a large, engaged community was a driving success for the campaign. If Old Spice launched this campaign without this community, the campaign would not have been a success. Building our communities based on our brand voice, message, and mission, we can create trust, loyalty and advocacy for our brand. And as we build this community of loyalists, we can activate for future campaign success.

Conversation: Another driving factor for success is the fact of simple conversation. Consumers are continually needed two way dialog, whether from their peers or from brands. Building a culture of conversation and discussion in the correct tone and voice, we can begin to build lasting relationships and trust, ever driving toward loyalty.

Content: Building off the social success Old Spice has seen with their TVCs and branded videos, they created a campaign that was solely based on relevant content. Not only did they provide responses relevant to the conversation but the video format allowed for better engagement and interaction. By creating content that is timely and relevant based on what is being said we can solve problems and fulfill needs that arise.

Distribution: Not all of the campaign lived on the Old Spice owned properties; some of the content was seeded and distributed on other sites. The team went out and distributed the content where the conversation was happening. By integrating content and response to where the conversations are happening allow us to better fulfill the need and solve the problems; creating thought leadership and better positioning for the brand.

Below is a recent interview with Eric Beane, VML’s Director, Optimization & Analytics

If you are ever looking to answer the questions, “What is emerging media?” and “Why does it matter?” you do not have to go much further than the “Did You Know” videos.

Originally created by a high school math teacher in Colorado, this video outlines the changing nature of human behavior based on the impact of the Internet.

The Did You Know concept continues to evolve.

Did You Know 4.0:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8]

Did You Know 2.0:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U]

Did You Know 3.0:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8]

Given the data below there is no question that online video consumption continues to accelerate and with this growth we see that YouTube continues to be the 600-pound gorilla. Along with this trend we will also see an acceleration of marketers evaluating how they can participate in the change in consumer behavior to deliver on their message.

A great example of a brand doing more than just trying to put their :30 second spots online is HP’s YouTube Channel. It does a good job of providing unique content that tells a story about the brand and conncets to the consumer.

The numbers:
Internet users viewed 21.4 Billion online videos in July 2009 alone (comScore)

• Up 31% from 14.8 Billion in January 2009
• 50% coming from the US
• 42% comes from YouTube

YouTube announced that in October that they were serving “well over a billion views a day”.

• In August YouTube had over 104 million viewers in the U.S. alone with over an estimated 350 million globally (Nielsen)
• Hulu was #2 with just over 10 million in the US.

In January of 2009, searches on YouTube in the United States edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. This has driven to the fact that video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S.(NYTimes)

“Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up and learning about the world through YouTube. In the first half of the 20th century, people grew up reading books and newspapers. Then there was a generation that grew up on movies and television. The last shift was to the Internet. And now web video is creating yet another generation. This is different, and powerful.” – ReadWriteWeb

[slideshare id=2637630&doc=youtube-091202224711-phpapp01]

Image Source: Jonsson