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A good friend recently posted the following bit of client interaction, where the client says to him, “We really like what Old Spice did with social media, but our legal department wants to be able to review and schedule all of our posts. Do you think that will slow us down any?”
Now, the Old Spice “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign has an awful lot going for it—a sharp creative agency, spot-on broadcast work that went viral organically, charming and willing talent. Yet it was the real-time nature of the Isaiah Mustafa response videos that took the whole deal into the viral stratosphere. That was the truly radical wrinkle. This campaign stands out not only because it was great work, but because they had the real-time playing field pretty much to themselves.
Real time response is a powerful thing. It carries a strong aura of authenticity and relevance, it demonstrates a level of effort and caring, and it suggests that a brand is not a cog in some hidebound corporate behemoth. Some savvy companies like Comcast, Southwest Airlines, and Best Buy have cottoned on to the benefits of using real-time social media such as Twitter for customer service. And bravo for that. But using it for marketing, that’s perhaps a bigger structural challenge. After all, customer service teams are designed to have actual contact with consumers; marketing and legal departments are not.
But let’s say you are, or are working with, that rare brand that can find a way to dive into social media without a long, painful process of reviewing and scheduling all posts with legal. What then? Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy, said they couldn’t have done the Old Spice response videos without a strong client-agency relationship. “There is such great trust [between the companies],” he said. “But we are being very responsible. They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them.”
Wieden + Kennedy’s mixing of regular joes with celebrities, both of the online (4chan, Perez Hilton) and tabloid (Demi Moore, Alysa Milano) varieties, was undoubtedly a serious traffic booster. Yet there are other tactics that the less connected and lower budgeted have used to good effect. Take the recent #wookieleaks Twitter storm. There was no brand or marketing campaign behind this, just a citizen with a clever idea. Struck by the aural similarity of Wiki to Wookie, Greg “Storm” DiCostanzo tied obsessive Star Wars geekery to the blockbuster news story around the Wikileaks release of secret Afghanistan war documents and, in short order, a Twitter Trending Topic was born that would eventually be picked up by other news media.
The key elements here included: a clever name/catch phrase, a peg to current events, some timely seeding, tapping into an existing fan base, and darn clever writing.
A word of caution to the many people whose bosses or clients have said “we should do something like Old Spice”: Cisco appears to be first out of the gate with an Old Spice homage. While they get kudos for being near-real-time, their results were less than amazing, with fewer than 3,000 video views to date. Yes, the Ted From Accounting effort features a guy in a towel in a bathroom and a number of personalized videos posted throughout the day, and it’s not an inherently bad idea… it just falls flat. Critics have pointed out that Ted does not have the fans and cred the Old Spice Guy had already established with his TV spots, that the Cisco Twitter effort was fractured across accounts in a way that the Old Spice campaign wasn’t, and that they missed out on obvious gags like “Look at your router, now back at mine, now back at your router, now back at mine. Sadly it isn’t a Cisco.”
We’re not against the idea of homages or recycling core concepts whatsoever (in fact, we had a great success with ALL YOUR SNAKES ARE BELONG TO US, an homage to the very first internet viral video; that piece generated millions of video views on a budget of less than $5k). But we do sincerely encourage you to consider the key lessons of real time, and not just the bedazzling results one brand managed to achieve.
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