On Tuesday, July 13 Old Spice kicked off what some called the biggest short term social media success to date. The Old Spice ‘Your Man’ campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy, included 183 videos featuring Isaiah Mustafa personally replying to consumers on YouTube.
The campaign yielded astonishing results:
- 130 million YouTube views
- +118% Facebook fans
- +227% YouTube subscribers
- +2800% Twitter followers
The campaign was groundbreaking in many ways. Wieden’s global interactive creative director Iain Tait told Fast Company they had a team of editors and creatives creating the ads in real time. And the tactic clearly established a strong community footprint for Proctor & Gamble’s Old Spice brand.
Overall conversation sentiment was 86% positive.
But interestingly, Isaiah Mustafa was the most mentioned related to the topic. No words directly related to Old Spice’s products even appear in the topic cloud.
How did the online buzz translate to sales? An Ad Age article reported: for the four weeks ending June 13, Old Spice’s sales were up 106% from the prior-year period. But, sales of Gillette body wash, backed by buy-one-get-one-free coupons and by their own TV ads were up a lot more, 277% (though it’s by far a smaller brand in the category).
And while Old Spice enjoyed a noticeable spike in the Body Wash conversation over Nivea, Gillette, Dove and Axe during the weeks surrounding the campaign, overall online chatter has leveled off among all competitors in the category.
Can Old Spice keep the conversation going? And what will Old Spice do with the online community footprint it has built to convert the fans and followers into loyal customers?
In addition, what’s a Facebook fan really worth? With answers ranging from $136.38 to $3.60, Forrester research says: zero, unless and until the brand does something to create value with Facebook fans.
How can other brands learn from this campaign to create other successful real-time marketing campaigns?
August 11, 2010
I would be really interested to see the Guts of this research. I can create similar reports and shift them around based on how a move internal terms. The % measurement number is non-applicable for Gillette for a host of reasons I wont get into here.
Old Spice can’t keep the conversation going without a shift… which is ok. However how accurate were these numbers really was there a defined methodology to terms? Did they have a team curate posts?
Just because I use a powerful tool to measure doesn’t mean I am not measuring junk! Garbage in Garbage out still applies!