Old Spice began a campaign last year using social media, humor and their audience members. It debuted as a tv commercial and from there went to YouTube.
Old Spice ran an entire marketing campaign revolving around this male actor. Viewers tweeted and commented on YouTube videos in mass amounts, and positive at that. Old Spice asked viewers what they would like the Old Spice man to do. Then came a succession of requests, which Old Spice did surprisingly well and quickly to respond to. Old Spice responded to celebrities, influential personnel, the average Jo and social media people.
Here is one where the Old Spice man responds to @pingchat
In Old Spice's last video he says farewell to his viewers and like all good things this must come to an end.
This is an excellent example of how powerful social media is and the amount of money it can save a company. Old Spice didn't have to pay advertising fees to tv networks for a commercial spot. Instead they ran a majority of their campaign from YouTube. They made their campaign humorous, interactive and most of all enjoyable. They were able to reach millions through humorous videos. Over 5 million people viewed his "re:everyone" video.
Have you heard of any similar marketing campaigns that used social media in such an impactful way?
These commercials are so well scripted and executed. Old Spice is a brand that was rarely associated with 'younger' generations until recent years.
ReplyDeleteThis campaign undoubtedly regained market share for the brand relative to other heavily advertised deodorant companies including Gillette, Axe, Degree, and Speed Stick.
Social media is a great way to expose a product to a large target audience, quickly and at low cost. Ford did this to introduce their Fiesta, unfortunately their timing for me as a consumer was not good. They built up the product for too long before it was available and I lost interest and purchased another car. Toms shoes does a great job on their facebook site to inform and and include the consumer- I purchased 5 pairs because of it! Starbucks uses "My Starbucks idea" to generate consumer interest and advertises specials on their facebook site. Twitter is also being used by many companies, Zappos being the most successful. I personally don't use Youtube to find products that I want to buy but as creative videos go viral I will definitely watch.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response, those all sound like great examples. Do you think as somebody who doesn't frequent YouTube, are you more likely to watch videos if the video has been linked through twitter feeds and facebook sites? It seems that one of the benefits of social media is that they're all linked together. It makes it easy to have the information come to you, rather than having to search for it.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think social media is important for ads to become viral. I do not go to YouTube per se to watch ads but if I see them posted on other sites I will click the link and then re-post and share it. I think that is a reason why companies are integrating different sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
ReplyDeleteI love these commercials, if you go to their YouTube page you can see how they made some of the commercials, its pretty interesting.
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