Digital marketing is still a relatively new area of the advertising world, and many companies seem to stumble while wading (or diving head-first) into the waters. It’s actually quite rare to find a company that does it right.
Old Spice has shown that it’s one of those companies that understands the digital space. A few months ago, the company aired what became a wildly successful ad featuring Isaiah Mustafa as an over-the-top yet deadpan “manly man” to advertise its products. The quirky campaign returned in June with a follow-up ad.
While the traditional ads stand well by themselves, Old Spice’s online integration really makes the campaign shine. They’re using Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program to reach out to the social networking community. They’re sponsoring a free shipping deal over at BustedTees, a company which (perhaps not coincidentally) sells a shirt based on the Old Spice ads. But their sponsorships and paid advertising pale in comparison to the truly innovative component of the campaign.
Over the course of the last day, Mustafa has starred in a series of over a hundred reply videos on Old Spice’s YouTube channel. Each video directly addresses a comment from a user on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Yahoo Answers, and many were shot and uploaded in just a couple of hours after the original post. The replies retain the voice and humor of the traditional ads, but the content of each is conversational; the replies cover everything from marriage proposals to commercial reenactments. (In some, the Old Spice Man uses other tweets from the commenter as fodder for his reply.)
This is digital advertising at its finest. It’s funny. It doesn’t push the product in every video (some don’t even mention Old Spice at all). It bridges the gap between traditional and digital advertising by using the same actor and character in both media. It treats both popular and lesser-known social networking users equally. And above all, it starts a conversation and generates buzz.
This is where we’re heading.
UPDATE: He/they sent roses to Alyssa Milano, playing off an exchange they’d had earlier in the day. Awesome.
