Category Archives: Think Viral

In honor of the summer vacation months, I now turn my head to how technology emulates and influences our traditions of past and future.   I was motivated to do so one day as I was anticipating my own vaunted getaway.  I found myself repeating a practice that I thought had no connection to modern interactive marketing trends – only to realize, I was wrong. Again.

What I was repeating is a long practiced road-trip tradition of mentally inventorying road-trip games.  These various kill-time endeavors reach from the annoying to useful to truly annoying to the essential. Games like – “Name that Semi” – a game where you try and call the truck maker name of a truck before others in the car.  In my day, just answering MACK Truck would net you 80% score without fail – it’s a harder game to play these days.  Or this one – “Punch bug yellow” – my children insist on playing this game 24/7 – 365 and my arm is sick of it.  (If you couldn’t tell, this is one of the “truly annoying” and painful games.  But my favorite and a favorite of every experienced road-trip-traveled parent is:  “Who can be quietest, the longest?”  This one is always executed with the wishful thought that “if only I could have started this a 1/2 hour ago.”  If these don’t strike a cord, Susan Fox’s article, Classic Road-Trip Games of Disney Family Fun has hand-ful more classics to give you the idea.

The surprising thing is – each and every one of these arcane and inane games shares a surprising common thread of connection to our modern technical lives.  They are all classic forms of the now in-vogue marketing strategy/term – Gamification.  As Wikipedia defines it:  gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the application and become engaged with it.

I see it as a marketing effort to turn either a brand interaction from boring to fun OR provide a fun experience during those times when a user is well – bored.  Which of course – is the point of road-trip games.  They are always engaged after hitting the n-teenth mile where everyone is about to keel over.

I guess this too has become the reason technology Gamified or “funware” brand experiences have become in vogue.  Apparently, all those people constantly checking-in, FarmVilling out, earning badges and becoming the mayor are just too bored with walking, crossing-the-street or say, engaging with the friend who’s house they just walked into on a visit.

And here is where the road-trip games and our new-tech versions differ.  The first – engages, and forces the assembled mass to face and conquer an entertainment challenge together – in the here, and now.  The other – pushes us away from the immediate situation, and people – and allows us to escape with a disconnected mass of “people” in the cloud.   So, this is the life we lead, with modern portable electronic entertainment devices that keep us connected, directed and spaced-out.

As a marketer and creative – I’m intrigued and entertained by the gamification strategy – I just hope they never come up with a funwared experience of “Smell the flowers.”

I like focus. I like crisp and orderly, thoughtful presentations distilled for quick and easy consumption. I have a very short attention span, and from interviewing executives and producing corporate videos for clients all over the world, I learned I am not alone.

Success in the world of corporate video production relies on many closely-followed tenets – glitch-free production, careful lighting, unblemished audio, crisp wardrobes, flattering make-up, finished length not to exceed three minutes, etc. While YouTube has demonstrated that if a video is clever enough, or funny enough, or richly informational or insightful, you can stray from some of these guidelines. But once in a while one comes along that ignores the rules and is still hugely successful.

Grand Rapids found itself on a list of “America’s Dying Cities” and decided to pull together and tell the world they were very much alive with an incredibly low-budget production that comes off not-schmaltzy, is moving and makes you want to hang in for the duration (10 minutes) to see what’s next. $40,000 budget, 2.7 million views — now that’s a successful marketing metric!

Old Spice has created a wildly successful social media campaign literally overnight. It all started with a commercial of the bare-chested, toweled, ladies man Isaiah Mustafa that rocked YouTube with its masculinity and humorous transitions. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign appeals to men and women alike, as it brings a sense of humor to a personal hygiene product line that dwindles in a competitive world of advertisements focused on sensuality.

To differentiate the brand, the online ads essentially ask women to compare their significant other to the hunky Old Spice Man. He says in a sultry-smooth voice, “Look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady scented body wash he could smell like he is me.” With over 34 million views on YouTube in less than a week, the 72-year-old brand knew for certain that it had the attention of the younger demographic with this video.

Isaiah Mustafa, his dashing good looks and his witty advice for consumers, have been online since February; but it wasn’t until early July of this year that Old Spice Man really started to “spice” up the social media scene. Keying in on YouTube as a primary medium, the brand produced one more commercial to speak directly to online audiences. The over-the-top charades continue with a “Should your man smell like an old spice man?” question and answer session that invites bloggers, Twitterers, YouTube commenters, and even celebrities big in the social networking sphere to personally ask the Old Spice Man questions—and receive real-time responses.

On July 14^th, the Old Spice production team and Isaiah Mustafa met in Portland, Oregon to create dozens of these short, comedic YouTube videos in response to the questions and comments of followers. In two days time, they managed to dish out 185 video responses to tweets that ask favors of Mustafa, seek his advice, or just look to get him to say their name over the airwaves. In three days time, the videos received 5.2 million views on the Old Spice channel of YouTube. And with the open invitation for Twitter followers to speak directly to the Old Spice Man, the brand’s Twitter following grew from a few thousand to now almost 90,000.

So what is it about this campaign that we need to understand? Three things.

1. Realize your true audience

Proctor and Gamble has recently come to understand that their primary target market is not, in fact, men. Their research concluded that women purchase nearly 70% of hygiene products (including shower gel) for the men in their households. With women making the shopping decisions, it just makes sense to target them in these dreamy, idealized advertisements, rather than demean them the way Axe and Tag product ads do.

2. Keep messaging short and simple

The attention span of online users is becoming increasingly shorter as a result of micro blogs and social media sites like Twitter, that require users to sum up what’s going on in 140 characters or less; anything longer and you may lose interest. Messages should be strategically developed to address this and ensure that the audience will stay intrigued or amused with your content. There are very few of these Old Spice ads over 1 minute.

3. Markets are conversations

The Cluetrain Manifesto wisely advises us that the world of marketing does not have to be a one-sided world. The introduction of the Internet has created endless possibilities for advertisers and marketers to interact with, obtain feedback from, and have direct conversations with their prospects. The Internet alone is an incredible tool, but with the addition of social media, viral video, and the blogosphere, it becomes a viable weapon.

Old Spice undoubtedly has the fastest growing viral campaign of any product. Ever. By evading expensive traditional media and surging full speed ahead to the target consumer on their computer or phone, Old Spice has revolutionized the way advertisers and marketers utilize social media. If social media can help a guy in a bath towel connect with customers, just imagine what it can do for your business.

For more on Old Spice see:

• OldSpice.com
• Old Spice on Twitter
• Old Spice on YouTube
• Old Spice Voicemail