Case Study – Old Spice YouTube Campaign

  • Posted by Harry
  • On November 18, 2011
  • 0 Comments
  • Case Study - Old Spice YouTube Campaign
Continuing from our previous posts which highlighted the importance of social video platforms and how they influence the perception of the brand, Mirror and Smokes explains a recent case to justify the same.
 
Old Spice is a brand that has been in the public consciousness for a long time now. It has however lost its sheen over the years and is seen as a product for older men and generations gone by. Here’s what Old Spice did though through their -“Ladies does your man look like me? No! But can he smell like me? Yes!” campaign, brought by Isaiah Mustafa. Old Spice managed to successfully to turn “your grandfathers” kind of product into a mighty sexy one. Here’s a video for if you haven’t come across it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLTIowBF0kE&feature=player_embedded#at=17
 
Having viewed it, Mirror and Smoke breaks down the campaign for you to understand what Old Spice did so well here.  
The success of the campaign lies not in the content of this broadcast video but rather in the fact that viewers were invited to ask questions about on the video on a multitude of social platforms. The public now voted for the best questions and Isaiah Mustafa in turn replied to each of these questions through a new video. As a result of this, the broadcast video managed to get over 32 million hits and even more importantly 170,000 subscriptions. What this means is that Old Spice managed to establish direct and continuous contact with 170,000 customers!  These customers were moulded into their brand advocates thus pushing their sales to an all-time high through an ingenious bit of indirect promotion.
 
What they managed to do was create an unprecedented amount of positive buzz for their product in a very short period of time. This is where the viral component of the internet really kicked in. They even answered some questions on Yahoo! Answers on their YouTube channel which is a study in itself. The channel was optimized to their objectives and in its own way reflected Old Spice. The colour schemes, the images the used and the overall theme were carefully chosen to ensure that the Old Spice brand image was well imprinted in the minds of the viewer and it has to be said, they were pretty successful in doing this.
 
At some point they used celebrities and people with large networks to popularize these videos. They re-tweeted at Gillette and Alisa Milano. The public on seeing these re-tweets and references attached further credibility to their campaign and this further enhanced their target base with little effort on the part of Procter and Gamble.
 
They also created a Facebook page which ensures a strong interaction with their customers followed. They constantly upload videos and relevant content onto their Facebook page to keep the conversation going. Currently they have over 45 million users on their Facebook page and Website Grader indicates over 2 million inbound links which is a staggering achievement by any stretch of the imagination. An even more mindboggling state, it ranks among the top 0.01% of all websites with an Alexa rank of 3 and a MozRank rating of 7.9 on a 10 point scale. They also use Twitter constantly with over 200,000 tweets on the homepage. What all this points out quite clearly is that Procter and Gamble have used all the available social media networks to derive the maximum benefit out of each having also realized that having people stay on your band wagon is a lot more important than getting them to view your page. It is also the harder of the two.
 
It used to be the one from the past or “my old man’s aftershave”. Now with clever positioning, the right message and a good looking man paired with the ease of sharing that YouTube and Twitter provide brand perception for Old Spice has taken a diametrically opposite tone. They successfully accomplished two goals with the broadcast videos:
” Sell more products.
” Change perception among women.
 
The inbound links ensured a strong search engine optimization thereby making it among the most viewed pages on Google and thus more people who had access to it and as a result more people posting the video on other forums. The snowball effect that the Old Spice Guy managed to create is so far unprecedented in all social media is something that you as product must aspire to emulate. This campaign serves as an inspiration to us at Mirror and Smoke, teaching us valuable lessons about Social Video optimization and how to use the in house expertise we have to maximum effect in our broadcast video, documentary or short film campaigns.