It may be that everything that needs to be said already has been, but I won’t let that stop me from sharing a couple of observations.
Integration Can Happen Over Time
These days almost every marketing program is developed with integration in mind, and the assumption is that all of the integration needs to happen at once. So you’ll see campaign architecture diagrams that look like something this:
All of the right channels are in place, and we think about how they all work together… all at the same point in time.
What I think is interesting in retrospect about the Old Spice Man is that the heavily interactive piece didn’t happen at launch. The first TV campaign hit months ago, but it wasn’t until the second flight of the campaign that the brand-directed (as opposed to organic) digital/social piece became so prominent.
Which implies a campaign architecture that looks more like this:
I think that’s an important point. For agencies it takes the pressure off to develop a digital home run right out of the gates, and at the same time actually makes it more likely that the digital campaign will succeed. With a bit of time to see how the public is reacting to the campaign, a better approach may emerge.
It would have been a bit presumptuous to have Old Spice Man responding to people’s tweets when the first campaign hit, because he was a stranger at that point. But once it became clear that the public was captivated by him, it in a sense gave the Wieden team permission to have him interact in such a direct and personal way with individuals.
Characters Are More Social Than Brands
When we think about developing social ideas we’re faced with a set of questions like:
How do we bring the brand to life in social spaces?
How should this brand behave in social spaces?
How do we translate our brand values into social behaviors?
And so on.
These are the right kinds of questions, but they’re awfully theoretical, and can lead to an almost academic approach. Which means that bringing a brand to life socially is pretty tricky.
On the other hand, bringing a character to life is pretty straightforward. How would the character behave in social environments? Umm, like him or herself. Social is about people, and characters are “people.” If you have a great character, the social strategy is probably sitting right in front of you.
We’ve seen quite a bit of this recently, though never as successfully as the Old Spice Man execution.
The Most Interesting Man in the World from Dos Equis was a big hit on YouTube and Facebook, for example.
Nationwide’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World wasn’t as big of a hit, but to be fair, he’s in the insurance business.
As social becomes more central to every brand and campaign strategy I think we’re going to see a lot of character driven advertising thanks to the success of the Old Spice Man. And if it leads to work as fun and memorable as what we’ve seen this week, I’m all for it.
PS: someone should make a mashup of the Old Spice Man hanging out with the Most Interesting Man in the World.
PPS: someone else should make one of these campaigns with a woman.
