Old Spice / we are social

Here are all of the posts tagged ‘Old Spice’.

We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #33

by Jordan Stone in News on 19 July 2010 at 17:51

Social Media Dominates Asia Pacific Internet Usage
Nielsen announced its Asia Pacific Social Media Report and found the region has undergone an unprecedented level of growth in the past year. Notably, social media is seen as having a noticeable impact on consumer purchasing decisions:

In Asia Pacific, online product reviews are the third most trusted source of information when making purchase decisions, behind family and friends. This is particularly so for purchases of consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars – products where consumers are most likely to base their purchase decisions on online product reviews.

The report looks at Internet usage across Korean, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore and China.

Foursquare in talks with Google, MS and Yahoo! about search partnerships
The Telegraph reports that Foursquare is in talks with the three major search engines which could allow people to look up the most popular bar or restaurant in their area in real-time. Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder, has said:

Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search… Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending

It’s worth noting that Twitter’s first commercial deals were with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, licensing its real-time feed of information.

Say Hello to the New MySpace Profiles
After reports of falling traffic figures, it looks as though MySpace is trying to change its fortunes by completely redesigning its user profiles. MySpace confirmed that it was demoing a new look and feel to the site, which includes:

An improved UI and navigation menu
A Facebook like newsfeed with a user’s recent activity
Social network integration with other sites like Facebook or Twitter

Facebook will announce 500 million users; announces 150 million on mobile
In anticipation of hitting the half billion user mark, Facebook is planning to mark the occasion with a new consumer marketing initiative called ‘Facebook stories’ in which they hope to celebrate the impact of the social network on their users’ lives.

The announcement is expected any day now, and will sit alongside other large milestones announced last week, such as hitting 141 million unique visitors in the US (comScore). There are also an estimated 150 global mobile users, according to Facebook’s Head of Mobile Products Eric Tseng, who also indicated last week that we can expect to see Facebook’s “Like” buttons in mobile applications soon.

The New York Times notes that with this impressive growth, comes some grim challenges at the social network grapples with how to handle deaths in the system as older users die:

Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group, with 6.5 million signing up in May alone… People over 65, of course, also have the country’s highest mortality rate, so the problem is only going to get worse.

That said, big steps have been made to improve the ease with which ‘ghosts in its machine’ are identified, and profiles can be “memorialised” such that grieving friends can still post messages on those pages as a tribute.

Apple deleting mentions of Consumer Reports’ iPhone 4 piece on forums
Since the iPhone 4’s release last month, Apple has been going through a bit of a rough time with widespread reports of an antenna design flaw that was causing the mobile signal to degrade and calls to be dropped.

Consumer Reports last week released independent findings that confirmed there was a design flaw with the iPhone 4 which caused problems with its reception. This news spread quickly online, but Apple made the questionable decision of “deleting threads about the Consumer Reports article from its support forums”, which deepened the crisis further.

Old Spice social media campaign
Last week Old Spice / Wieden+Kennedy turned a lot of heads with its innovative use of social media for its ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign. We’ve twice written about the campaign so it needs little summary here – head over to our previous posts to learn more.

Starbucks is the first brand to reach 10 million Facebook fans
Following on the heels of Lady Gaga becoming the first ‘person’ to gather 10 million fans, Starbucks has now become the first brand to collect 10 million fans for its Facebook page. According to Inside Facebook:

The company’s audience of 10 million people around the world has been hard won with marketing, promotions and advertising. Over the years Starbucks has given away free ice cream on Facebook, been recognized by Facebook [for fan page innovation] and was also the most popular brand [on the social network].

Ben & Jerry’s drops email in favour of social media
Ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s is looking to abandon its current email marketing activity in favour of using social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to engage with customers on an ongoing basis. The decision was based on the feedback they received from customers who would prefer being contacted via social media. Ben & Jerry’s still plans to send one email update to customers each year, and the company has received “mainly positive feedback on the decision” thus far.

K2 Skis redirects entire company website to Facebook
K2 Skis has made the bold decision to redirect the company’s entire website to its Facebook Fan Page in an effort to boost its fan base. By becoming a Fan of their page, users will be able to see next year’s line up. All Facebook notes that this is the first time they’ve “ever seen a company shut down their corporate site as part of a promotion,” but it doesn’t appear to be driving significant numbers just yet.

BT uses social media to decide ending for TV ad campaign
BT has taken to Facebook in order to have the public decide the ending to their long-running ‘Adam and Jane’ TV ad campaign. Fans of the “Please don’t let Adam and Jane off the BT home hub advert break up…” Facebook group were given a sneak peak of the ad before it aired this weekend, and asked to vote on the ending which will be aired in late August.

The Human Avatar

The internet is a dark dark place. And Josh is their plaything

This just about sums up The Human Avatar campaign for EA’s new game All Points Bulletin (APB). To tie in with the customisation available in the new game, APB decided to take a real person and over the course of several weeks transform them into a real-life avatar that will be released in the game – all to be decided by votes via their website. After selecting the candidate Josh, users then voted on his haircut (cyber punk), piercing (septum) and tattoo (back wings).

tagged: Apple, Ben & Jerry's, BT, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, iPhone 4, K2, MySpace, Nielsen, Old Spice, Starbucks, The Human Avatar, Twitter, Wieden+Kennedy

Old Spice videos viewed 11 million times

by Jordan Stone in News on 15 July 2010 at 14:59

It had to end at some point…

After the third day of activity, Isaiah Mustafa and Old Spice have bid farewell to their ‘Internet friends’ and recorded their final YouTube video. Much has been written about the campaign over the last few days (see our case study with links here), and the buzz on blogs and Twitter have been explosive.

Here at We Are Social, we were a bit curious as to what the viewing figures looked like so we had a closer look at the Old Spice YouTube Channel. This is what we found:

Total videos uploaded: 183
- 12 July, 2010: 29 videos uploaded
- 13 July, 2010: 89 videos uploaded
- 14 July, 2010: 65 videos uploaded
Combined viewing figures: 10,954,096
Average video view (mean value): 59,858 views
Median value: 40,536 views (Re: Idgit | Old Spice)
Most watched video: 511,694 views (Re: Perez Hilton | Old Spice)

15 Most Popular Videos

Rank	Video Name	Views	Date Uploaded	Video #
1	Re: Perez Hilton \| Old Spice	511,694	13-Jul-10	32
2	Re: Anonymous \| Old Spice	382,728	13-Jul-10	39
3	Re: @kevinrose \| Old Spice	329,258	12-Jul-10	16
4	Re: @kpereira \| Old Spice	290,461	12-Jul-10	27
5	Re: rosemcgowan \| Old Spice	275,472	13-Jul-10	118
6	Re: jsbeals \| Old Spice	233,838	13-Jul-10	108
7	Re: @TheEllenShow \| Old Spice	231,960	12-Jul-10	1
8	Re: @Gizmodo \| Old Spice	199,040	13-Jul-10	110
9	Re: Starbucks \| Old Spice	177,008	13-Jul-10	113
10	Re: Alyssa_Milano \| Old Spice	172,294	13-Jul-10	55
11	Re: Alyssa_Milano \| Old Spice	165,338	13-Jul-10	88
12	Re: wheresweems \| Old Spice	157,028	13-Jul-10	115
13	Re: pandarr \| Old Spice	151,069	14-Jul-10	144
14	Re: themrchris0426 \| Old Spice	149,183	13-Jul-10	117
15	Re: Laiba \| Old Spice	144,450	13-Jul-10	3

YouTube viewing figures are based on data collection ending 14:00 BST (09:00 EDT, 06:00 PDT) 15th July 2010
View raw data here

Among these popular videos, celebrities and key online figures standout like Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Kevin Rose. The video directed at ‘Anonymous’ deserves a special mention:

According to ReadWriteWeb:

How loved has the new campaign proven to be? 4Chan, the anonymous nihilist obscene messageboard from whence sprang memes like LOLCats and RickRolling, was the subject of [Anonymous]… 4channers hate everything, especially people who talk about 4chan – which this savvy man in a towel did not do.

And now it occupies the second most watched spot, which is no small feat.

This covers off on the publicly available viewing figures (which have surely grown during the time of writing this), but there is surely so much more that can be learned from how the online audience behaved with this campaign and from the viewing behaviour on YouTube. Things like:

Comments – Which videos were the most discussed/engaging? Was there any discussion of purchase preference or the Old Spice product in these comments, and how can this be fed back into product marketing and development?
Demographics – Which audience(s) did this campaign appeal to the most? What is the age/gender make up, and the geographic spread of viewers? How does this compare with Old Spice’s target customer?
Sharing data – How did the Old Spice videos make their way across the web? How did videos reach secondary and tertiary audiences? What were the most important platforms in driving this reach (Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Reddit vs. Digg vs. blogs)?
Embed data – Who and what were the most popular / influential sources to embed the videos? What was the ratio of views on YouTube, compared to views of videos embedded elsewhere?

The opportunities for measurement are almost endless, and Wieden + Kennedy / Proctor & Gamble are sitting on some very interesting data behind the YouTube account login. We definitely hope to learn more over the coming months.

Time above shown in BST, which is 5 hours ahead of EDT, and 8 hours ahead of PDT

Meanwhile Twitter over the last few days has been busy:

Twitter volumes
Twitter data collection ended 13:30 BST (08:30 EDT, 05:30 PDT) 15th July 2010, query: “Old Spice” OR oldspice

Since 13 July 2010 there’s been about 175K Old Spice related tweets, and they were broken down as follows:

Tweet types

26% were retweets, which indicates how readily people passed around the content online. Meanwhile 8% were @replies, and the overwhelming majority of those were directed at @oldspice, showing that people were quite keen to get involved (even me). The remaining ‘regular tweets’ were, by and large, people commenting about the ‘old spice guy’/’old spice man’ videos as they watched, and shared the YouTube links. A cursory read of these Tweets were found to be extremely positive, which probably comes as no surprise. A word cloud, drawn from a sample of 10,000 Tweets from 13 July – 15 July tends to support this:

The words “Old Spice” and “@oldspice” were removed from the word cloud for clarity.

It’s worth noting that words like hilarious, like, love and awesome are among the 50 most prominent words of the 157,849 rendered in the word cloud.

So what now? It appears that Wieden + Kennedy and Old Spice have created a bit of a monster, but have phased out activity while it was still fresh and universally liked. I imagine the video viewcount will continue to climb as people make their way through all 183 videos, and the Twitter buzz will likely calm down. I expect attitudes towards the brand will remain positive, though it will be really interesting to see if this translates directly into sales.

As succesful as this campaign has been however, I can’t say that I envy the people behind it… I mean, how do they top that? Naturally, we’re hoping they (or perhaps even, we) do!

tagged: AdWeek, Alyssa Milano, Biz Stone, Campaign, Gizmodo, Isaiah Mustafa, Kevin Rose, Old Spice, Perez Hilton, Starbucks, Twitter, Wieden + Kennedy, YouTube

Social media buzz. Advantage: Old Spice

by Jordan Stone in News on 14 July 2010 at 12:52

The Cannes Film Grand Prix-winning Old Spice campaign has evolved over the last 24 hours to dominate discussion in social media, in what is sure to become the ‘case study du jour’ for the foreseeable future.

“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” spot from Wieden + Kennedy Portland was launched in February during the Super Bowl. It featured Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL athlete, being totally awesome and became an almost immediate hit online. It has since racked up almost 13 million views on YouTube, with a couple new iterations launched in recent weeks.

Yesterday, however, the marketing campaign took a different turn and really got ‘social media right’. It’s been updated and sees Isaiah Mustafa respond directly to YouTube comments, Tweets, Yahoo! Answers and blog posts about him in 117 publicly available, timely and personalised video messages.

To ensure maximum coverage Old Spice replied to some of the most popular personalities on Twitter, such as @Biz (Twitter co-founder), @ryanseacrest (TV personality), @kevinrose (Digg founder), @Alyssa_Milano (actor), and @guykawasaki (social media thought leader). Blogger Perez Hilton’ s video response has already clocked up over 115k views. They’ve also hit up media outlets like GQ, Huffington Post, Gizmodo and The Ellen Show. Starbucks have even managed to get in on the action.

So what are the results? It’s still early to tell, but a few things are apparent.

The activity, according to Campaign, appears to be targeted at the ‘Twitter generation’ and it seems to be doing the trick. There has been a noticeable increase in followers to the @oldspice account, as well as a surge in conversation volume about the brand over the past 24 hours.

Searches for “old spice” or oldspice for the last week up until 10.45am today turned up the following:

That’s pretty spectacular, and the volumes were enough for Old Spice to trend on Twitter. What’s interesting though, is that Old Spice started yesterday as a Twitter Promoted Trend, but quickly ‘earned’ the status. TechCrunch explains:

[Old Spice] also just redefined the model for Promoted Trends. Old Spice is a promoted Trend, which takes you to the Old Spice Twitter account highlighting these videos as individual responses addressing each Twitter user who gets their own Old Spice commercial. The irony is that if Old Spice hadn’t paid to be a promoted Trend, it probably would have made it as a Trending Topic organically.

This morning Old Spice is still trending, organically.

There has been a similar increase in discussion on blogs as well. Again, a simple search for “old spice” or oldspice for the last week up until 11.45am today turned up the following:

But a key question is: can this goodwill and online buzz translate into sales?

Though the original adverts have been a massive hits, and clocked up millions of views on YouTube, sales of Old Spice haven’t necessarily seen the same upward trend. Just yesterday AdWeek reported that sales of the Old Spice body wash have actually dropped 7 percent over the last year.

So this surge of social media activity certainly comes at an interesting time, and it will be worth keeping an eye on, especially as brands like Dominos Pizza publicly pin their good fortunes on social media activity.

Ultimately, this level of social media engagement which was born from a television advert is really remarkable. Old Spice has done a great job in updating the campaign so that it really ‘works’ online. Most importantly though, the video responses are consistently funny in their own right, making it hard not to love this campaign.

So on that note, we’ll leave you with Isaiah Mustafa’s responses to The Huffington Post, Guy Kawasaki and Perez Hilton – some of the finest examples:

Huffington Post

Guy Kawasaki

Perez Hilton

Update: ReadWriteWeb has the lowdown on how the Old Spice videos are being made:

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. Here’s how it’s going down…

Fast Company also have an interview with our old friend Iain Tait who’s been working on the project:

One of the unique things taking place in the studio is we have a team of social media people, we have the Old Spice community manager, we have a social media strategist, a couple of technical people, and a producer. And we’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally relevant community.

Iain also gives more background on the project on his own blog.

And now it seems, the end has arrived, with this closing message from Isaiah: