David Penz
The Internet is buzzing about Old Spice’s new viral video campaign. Many marketers view this as a great social media success story, but as Augie Ray at Forrester pointed out, there are as many if not more lessons to be learned about marketing in general. Here are 5 steps any marketer can take to apply lessons learned from Old Spice’s success to their campaigns:
- Show off your abs: Take a step back and give the members of your team the freedom to show off their talents and strengths. P&G put the spotlight on their social media experts, IT staff, and writers and allowed them to create content with little direct supervision. What they found was that by making them the stars of the campaign, the team was motivated to go above and beyond in creating the building blocks of the campaign.
- Jump in: Go from 0 to 60 in accelerating your marketing efforts as fast as you can, and do not stop or slow down until the campaign is finished. The Old Spice team did not publish a few videos, measure response to gauge interest, and resume when success was guaranteed. Instead, they took a Swan Dive straight in without looking back and created over a hundred videos in only a few days.
- Lather: Use the current campaign to spread and build on the success of previous campaigns. The success of Old Spice’s social campaign is getting a lot of attention, but it would not have effectively gained the instant attention of viewers if it were not based on the popular television commercial.
- Sing: Let loose and have some fun. What is appealing about the Old Spice videos is that they are really funny and do not feel like corporate messages. You get the feeling when watching that the entire team genuinely had a lot of fun creating the campaign.
- Rinse: Let your campaign end cleanly, on a good note. If Old Spice had continued on and hadn’t stopped making videos, viewers could have actually gotten sick of the videos. The last line of the last Old Spice video sums this up perfectly: “like all great things this too must end.”
About the Author:
David Penz is a Marketing Analyst with SIGMA Marketing Group.
