Every day thousands of business and advertising agencies attempt to leverage the power of social media to gain new customers. You have the social media atrocities such as “Bing Goes the Internet” from Microsoft (not embedded because it is SO bad) to the “Where the Hell is Matt” campaign that ran a few years ago.
Both involved very… well… bad dancing, but there is a new approach to the social media advertising campaign that is making strides. Let me start off by first going over what is generally wrong with traditional advertising and what is being done today to get customers involved.
Traditional advertising is focused on pushing the product, repeating the product’s name, blasting phone numbers and locations of where to buy. As you have heard time and time again from the advertising department, customers are learning how to tune these advertisements out when watching television or surfing the web.
Old Spice (through the use of Isaiah Mustafa) and advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy has successfully run a social media advertising campaign that is not only building product awareness but has actually built an engaged Twitter, YouTube, and reddit following.
The videos with Mustafa in the bathroom talking to the Internet have become a hit, attracting hundreds of thousands of views so far. So what did Old Spice do correctly that everyone else seems to have missed?
They got over their own product. I am sure everyone has seen Old Spice sitting in the drug store and we all know there are a ton of competitors in the market. Instead of sitting there and trying to get people to fall in love with the product, they realized that no one gets excited over deodorant. Instead of spouting off 10 reasons why it is better than Gillette (a sister company as stated in one video – Smiley face emoticon) they build a connection between you and their brand.
They weren’t late. It will be interesting to see the responses to the campaign from other competitors. In my opinion everyone else in the market has missed the boat. Not only were they the first to make a splash (as in the original video seen above), but they were timely in dealing with the Internet. The campaign was geared to responding to the Internet and gave the masses what they are constantly looking for: ATTENTION.
It was planned and calculated. From the first video leading up to the last video, the team had direction, had a plan and took all the necessary steps to keep the audience engaged. When was the last time you read a stream of comments for anything on the internet that was positive?
The days of companies thrusting their products on to customers are over…hopefully. To all those big companies out there that continue to advertise using traditional methods: it’s not that I don’t want your product, because in fact I most likely do if you’ve targeted me. It’s just that I can’t stand to be told what I want. I want to feel more like a customer than just a purchaser.
These are some of my favorite videos that he produced:
