By now you have probably seen the Old Spice Guy, Isaiah Mustafa, You Tube commercials. In a series of videos all shot in one day old spice responded to various posts and comments from a variety of social media sources. This video of the Old Spice Guy for Alyssa Milano is one of my favorites. It even spawned three follow ups from the Old Spice Guy and a response from Alyssa Milano. This campaign has gained Old Spice a lot of praise for a creative use of social media. Although the campaign was based on a social media tool kit was it really a social media campaign? I don’t think so.
It used name dropping of famous and not so famous people in creative ways allowing it to generate a massive amount of exposure but, it did not succeed in building a connection between the brand and the its customers. In many ways this is just an extension of classic marketing techniques. Now, look at it using the D.A.R.T framework from co-creation of value, which is what Maple Seed Marketing uses as its barometer for a social media campaign. Except for the Alyssa spots very little dialog really occurred in this campaign. No additional access was created. Risk for the consumer was not reduced and it was actually increased for Old Spice. Finally transparency was not increased no new insights were gained about how the product was developed or how the consumer uses the product. So what does that say? In my opinion this is not a social media marketing campaign. A creative and original campaign yes, a social media marketing no.
As a result the campaign has not been as effective as it could have been. This recent Yahoo News article shows that Old Spices sales have actually declined since the beginning of the Isaiah Mustafa campaign. Is this because the campaign isn’t social by our definition? Probably not but it is a good reminder that just because you generate a lot of buzz you may not actually increase your sales.
Earlier I mentioned that this campaign actually increased the risk to Old Spice. And in this case Old Spice got lucky, in her response to the Old Spice Guy; Alyssa Milano challenged him to make a $100,000 charitable contribution to gulf coast clean up. P&G the parent company of old spice has politely declined her challenge. P&G declined the challenge by having there PR firm contact Alyssa directly. I think this is a huge missed opportunity. Alyssa posted a very nice blog post on why they will not be making the donation. In their response P&G highlighted all of the charitable good they are already doing. Which is a legitimate reason no to rise to the challenge. But, what if instead of sending their PR firm behind closed doors to Alyssa to say no they had the Old Spice Guy respond? There are a lot of reasons not to do this as well but I think it would have been worth the risk. For the most part P&G will get past this without any damage to their reputation as the news cycle has already moved on, but what if Alyssa had decided to make an issue of their refusal to her 949,705 twitter followers?
UPDATE: July 29 2010
Advertising age has a nice article on the effectiveness of the Isaiah Mustafa campaign here. Although there is still a lot of questions surround this campaign my point still stands that it could have been better if it were truly social.