The Campaign Your Campaign Could Work Like

"Monocle smile!"

Portland-based Wieden+Kennedy is already a legendary ad agency. It invented Nike’s “Just do it” tagline, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong yellow cancer wristbands, the Honda Accord ‘Cog’ and Honda Civic ‘Choir’ TVCs…

And more recently, of course, Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’. Epic, absurd, yet simple and assured in its appeal to both men and women, it reinvented a fusty grandpa brand as the epitome of manliness. It was a true ‘viral’ – something people instinctively wanted to share with their friends because it was awesome.

It’s also a complex, one-shot commercial produced with a minimum of CGI, and it deservedly won its production company, MJZ Los Angeles, a Grand Prix for Film at the recent Cannes Advertising Festival.

Many agencies and clients would probably rest on their laurels at this point. But W+K just kept pushing the campaign to new, exciting places. A new and even more complex iteration of the same idea, ‘Questions’, debuted two weeks ago, showing NFL footballer-turned-actor Isaiah Mustafa moving from a beach to a mountaintop cabin, swan-diving off a waterfall into a hot tub then appearing on a motorcycle.

Now, Mustafa is back offering individual messages to people who get excited about Old Spice online. Attack Of The Show host Kevin Pereira, who’d tweeted: “Old Spice does it again! SWAN DIVE!” got this personal thank you message:

When Susannah Breslin blogged at The Frisky about how “visually pleasurable” the ads were, she got this hilarious, knowing response:

It even looks as though Old Spice is reaching out to random internet commenters who haven’t even engaged with the brand. Check this video, addressed to a hapless Yahoo! Answers user:

That snorkel shows commitment. As Mumbrella points out, the real genius of these is that mainstream media outlets are beginning to realise that they can provoke their own tailored response from Old Spice, which they’ll then go on to share with their own audiences. Here’s one directed to tech blog Gizmodo:

And on it goes – in a meta twist, there’s even a video based on one of Mustafa’s own tweets. At the time of writing there were 118 of these videos and counting. It’s pretty amazing that W+K has the resources to copywrite these witty responses so quickly and get Mustafa to deliver them to camera.

Much as the original ad was a true viral, so these response videos immerse the Old Spice brand in online social media in an exciting way. They don’t just float on top of the online conversation like oil on water; rather, they engage with it and shake it up. Of course this will be a much-imitated online advertising strategy; but The Enthusiast wonders if future such ads will be as well-written or as powerful.

Related stories:

1. Logging Out To Get Some Real Work Done Social network users are committing digital 'suicide' to spend more...
2. What A Proper Ad Campaign Oughta Be Blokey retailers Home Timber And Hardware and Repco bank on...
3. Judge Back To Work With Extract Terminally under-appreciated japester Mike Judge aims for more cult infamy...
4. Review: Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr Hunter S Thompson Alex Gibney's vivid retelling of the strange and terrible saga...