As a young kid, I spent a lot of time at my grandparent’s place in Bushwick, Brooklyn. They were de facto babysitters for my sister and me, who had two working parents with afterschool childcare needs and the desire to preserve their sanity with the occasional evening out.

Grandpa used Old Spice. The image of the white bottle sitting on his dresser in front of the mirror, next to a pocket comb he didn’t need; and the smell of him, musky island breeze, dark rum and cigarettes (yes, he smoked–you could still do it on planes back then) are forever stamped in my memory. That the brand took on the task of updating itself for today’s man is no mystery; it was a necessity. And it was done quite well. Everyone, including me, loves The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. As a TV campaign the Mustafa work was executed flawlessly – it entertained; it brought the funny. It made me think about smelling like my grandfather–as a good thing.

And it also became an Internet hit because as it turns out, when you have a great piece of content–be it fifteen seconds of something user-generated, a documentary style five minute time-lapse, or a thirty-second spot originally developed for TV– people will seek it out, as the Internet has enabled them to.

Several thousand, or perhaps millions of hits later it became clear that what we were watching wasn’t just a Man On A Horse. It had the potential to become something much bigger. And it did become bigger. Enter Facebook, and customized responses to viewer questions from Mustafa. They’re hilarious. People engaged with the new face of the brand and they had some fun with it. They enjoyed themselves. A hit.

Where’s the miss?

It’s a tricky question and the answer depends on your perspective. There may have been no miss, or, there might’ve been missed potential, or this might have been a hit that causes subsequent misses for brands taking a crack at the model.

Transparency demands that I admit to having no clue about how the Old Spice idea came to be, and that, for the purpose of discussion, I’m reconstructing the model of initiative development from the outside in. Those of us in digital will recognize it instantly:

The brand’s traditional agency came up with a campaign idea, in the case of Old Spice, a really good one. The TV spots were developed, and somewhere along the way, (but after concept development) the need for a digital strategy was realized. The easy answer here: put the spots on a website along with some ringtones and wallpapers and the opportunity to buy. But this solution failed to harness the true power of social; where every marketer’s head is these days. And Mustafa needed to live in the social space. Social media is the new viral (and by definition is viral). And so the Facebook tactic followed. Win. But…

The medium your campaign could act like

Miss? Why treat digital like TV? The TV experience is passive. It pushes messages at you. The beauty of digital is that it allows for interaction. That interaction should go further than the selection of which TV spot you want to watch or where to buy.

Mustafa now lives on Facebook and Twitter, yes. But that’s no reason to keep you in the dark about his escapades while you’re at oldspice.com is it? You might come back to the site if you had a reason. Speaking of which…

What about user participation? (Facebook responses aside.) What about getting the product into your hands (a sample perhaps?), and letting you show what happens when you smell like the man your man should smell like? For example, could there be a way to enable a little video UGC? (The “C” here could just as well stand for “Campaign.”)

The thing to watch out for here is a tricky precedent being (re)set. And this is something we in the digital space will have to manage. It was a great TV campaign that ran basically as TV in the online space and was successful (more than 600,000 “likes” on Facebook). Most TV does not go very far when it’s slapped online (if at all). As our clients begin asking for their “Old Spice campaign” digital equivalent (or, to put it bluntly, to simply run the TV spots online) we will have some explaining to do.

The gist of that explanation is simply this. Online is a great space for an idea either to begin or evolve. The Mustafa campaign was a great idea. Digital offers more to it than the recreation of the TV experience. Digital stays it in touch, nurtures relationships and enables new connections. We build the brand. We drive product sales. We allow consumers to be part of the campaign. We do it better when we’re part of concept development–from the outset. We do it better when the ask for digital, is actually asked of digital. (Imagine if you will, the momentum that could have been generated if a proper digital strategy had been activated when the TV campaign launched.)

In a sense, the Old Spice effort does all of this. If the idea was to literally leverage the TV ad in the online space and then film responses in what seemed to be a one-time, marathon fashion, the campaign is an A+. Still, I wonder what could have been…

Gary Nelson
Ed.Note: Blogger Rob Paterson at the FASTForward blog had a similar analysis of the Old Spice campaigns, and in fact compared the work and results to the UbyKotex campaign: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/07/27/the-market-is-a-conversation-why-kotex-is-winning-vs-old-spice/