The „Old Spice“ Campaign of „the man your man could smell like“ has certainly caused a lot of buzz within the social media community lately, and I have bookmarked a fair share of links on my delicious account lately.
Now there is an official case study video by Wieden+Kennedy with the story of the campaign, as well as some interesting facts and figures.
Fascinating stats, of course the sales figures all relative numbers, not actual figures:
More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech
Total video views reached 40 million in a week.
Campaign impressions: 1.4 billion.
Since the campaign launched, Old Spice Bodywash sales are up 27%; in the last three months up 55%; and in the last month up 107%
Simon Sinek has written a book about a brilliant idea: „Start with why„. Now he has written a semi-good blogpost about the ad industry titled „I hate you: a tale about the advertising industry„. His main take out: agencies knowingly produce stuff people don’t want to see, so they look for ways to make people watch that stuff anyway. His proposal:
the ad industry should work to improve the quality of their product to a point where people want to watch it.
Well, isn’t that what creative agencies are trying to do anyway? It’s a problem of targeting. The best ad is wasted on someone who doesn’t care or even hate the brand. And once an ad is well targeted, it’s message should be relevant, and there should be no question about acceptance. A good creative targeted at the right audience should never fall into the trap of being annoying.
However, the world isn’t perfect, and in mass distributed media, there will always be a spillover – i.e. ads delivered to people who don’t care about the brand, the message, the offer. And it’s not only a question of entertainment, as Simon Sinek suggests:
The quality of advertising should always be measured based on how entertaining or engaging it is. They should stop measuring how many people are forced to watch (reach and frequency) and start measuring how many people choose to watch.
The main factor is not entertainment, it’s relevance. An ad can be highly successfull, if relevant, even if it’s not in the least entertaining. Given the right context, a fitting message and good targeting, you might also want to call advertising „information“.
Of course, if neither of that is true, you should call it „spam“ or simply annoyance.
The main point of Sinek is, however, that ad agencies produce their creative having a different target audience in mind: the client. For that matter, we might even add another target audience that sometimes play an important role: jurys of advertising award shows. Much of what is created serves to satisfy individual client needs, or may be even simply client internal political structures.
So Sinek argues, that ad agencies should instead again focus on their main target audience: the end customer.
Producing a product for the consumers who are the ones actually consuming the product makes more business sense, too. Clients would be able to spend less on media because the work would be more memorable. Plus, if people CHOOSE to watch the ads, they are more likely to like the brands, products and companies featured in those ads. In other words, if advertising was made for consumers and not clients the ultimate benefactor would actually be the client…and isn’t that supposed to be the job of good advertising?
Good idea. Given what I notice in the industry, this is definitely the intention when creating new ideas. Within the realm of highly user-centric media such as social media, this thinking has already started to sink in. It just needs to permeate all the layers of „integrated“ agencies, until even the most classically oriented teams are also familiar with this idea.
Here is a viral marketing ploy that I was sent (seeded?) from two different email addresses within 20 Minutes this morning. A couple of guyss purchase a McD burger and find an image of „the king“ toasted into the bun.
One of the links they sent me leads to a page, where a guy speculates about this mystery, seemingly he always speculates about mysteries like that:
Listen I’m one of those guys who never believes shit like this. Like when people see Jesus in their banana or they get a p*nis shaped cheeto I’m always like relax. It’s just a fucking cheeto. But this one is different. I mean if that’s not the fucking King in this guy’s bun than I don’t know what is.
All of this reminds me, somehow, of the Lincoln Fry Mystery-Viral campaign in 2005, where a French fry in the shape of Lincolns silhouette caused some buzz; note: all of the links in my 2005 blogpost don’t work properly any longer, unfortunately. Luckily, the campaign made it into Wikipedia, so you can find some more details there. (The prop used in that campaign was sold for 75k on a yahoo auction. I wonder for how much the bun will sell…?)
I really enjoyed the presentation below published by Kai Platschke provocatively titled „Digital is dead“. It isn’t nonsense, of course, instead Kai argues that soon enough, everything is digital. So it won’t make sense any longer to differentiate between digital and non-digital. I strongly agree!
The new stats of Facebook in Germany are amazing. Growth during the last few months has been aroung 10% more or less steadily. With 9.1 million users, facebook is now the largest social network in Germany, having surpassed StudiVZ, which used to be the largest.
In terms of sociodemographic, it is still 50/50 between men and women, the largest group being within the age bracket of 18-34 years old. Representative enough for most social media marketing initiatives.
The implications for marketers are quite interesting. When thinking about social media activities, facebook is now the big pond in which to place the lure. It’s the place to go to when thinking about launching any involving apps or quizzes to reach the target audience.
Yet, it is still a place where most users just go to find out about the news from their network. Some (attractive) brands have achieved „likes“ and made into the newsfeed of users. But I bet there are many more brands that have launched facebook activities which never made the news. Which will be the most successful German brands on Facebook at the end of 2010? I’ll keep you posted.
Wo ich sonst so bin...