When was the last time you had a room full of geeks, marketers, and writers brainstorming ways to market your station using social media? For Old Spice, that day was last month. On July 13, a team of eccentric creative people gathered at a private location in Oregon and produced 87 short (minute-or-less) videos about Old Spice. Actor Isaiah Mustafa starred in the videos, which were written, recorded, edited, and posted all in real time. As each video was finished, it was posted by the team on YouTube and promoted on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and various blogs.

Within two days, the videos had been viewed over four million times.


The idea was constructed by Old Spice’s marketing agency, Wieden and Kennedy. They constructed a group of people who wrote short videos about Old Spice. Then, as viewers commented back on Twitter, the Old Spice team produced new videos in response to the real time feedback.

View all of the responses, including Tweets and subsequent video responses from Alyssa Milano, Ellen DeGeneres, Perez Hilton, George Stephanopoulos, Huffington Post, and Starbucks.

Or, visit the Old Spice YouTube channel.

Or, see the chronology of the videos.

What can be learned from this interesting Old Spice marketing experiment?

1. This project generated MILLIONS of viewers online. Yet, the expense was minimal. It only required a green screen and a group of creative people. Imagine what your programming team could accomplish with a video camera, a green screen, some unbridled creativity, and an ambitious attitude. Some decent lighting, a green wall (or hanging sheet), and creative writing could accomplish a lot with the cheap video editing software available online.
2. Social Media Creates Web Traffic. The number of searches for “Old Spice” on Google increased by 500% with this stunt. Below is a graph from Google Insights showing the number of searches for “Old Spice” (by index) for the year 2010. It’s a good indicator that there was real buzz from the viral videos posted on Old Spice’s behalf.
3. Flexibility and Freedom Pays Off. Procter and Gamble gave an unprecedented amount of freedom and trust to the creative group to create and post the viral videos in real time based on audience feedback. While this may seem like a significant risk for a company that has closely guarded and controlled messaging about its products in the past, the project would not have worked without trust and flexibility granted to the team.
4. Engage with popular people to go viral. The response videos posted by the Old Spice Man weren’t for just anybody. The team methodically aimed for responses from people like Kevin Rose (founder of Digg.com), Milano, Justine Bateman, DeGeneres, Hilton, and other big names. Since thousands of people follow each of those people, the videos went viral faster. The lesson here is that engaging with people who are followed by lots of other people will help you get more traffic on social networks faster.

The STAR of the ad was the AUDIENCE. Sure, the Old Spice Man was the person on camera, but the audience fueled the content, interaction, and distribution of the campaign.