Oh Old Spice Campaign, how I have a love-hate relationship with you. I love the initial videos and how you leveraged social media in a new and innovative way. It’s not every day that an ad campaign for a deodorant can garner 30 million views on Youtube. But, lately you’ve grown stagnant. You don’t engage with your fans and followers and now all you are doing is “push marketing.”
The Old Spice campaign has turned into a case study for what not to do in social media.
PR/Marketing professionals, like myself, rely heavily on these case studies to stay on top of the latest and greatest social media/viral video campaigns. We watch them, read about them and pretty much analyze them to death. That’s fine. That’s part of the learning process.
But lately I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. People are growing lazy. Instead of learning from them, people are just trying to mimic these “successful campaigns.” That’s a real problem.
Even Sesame Street tried to put their own spin on the Old Spice Smell Like Your Man campaign. While their Smell Like a Monster video has 6 million views, that’s not even close to the level of impressions that the first Old Spice video got.
For starters, many of these campaigns have some real flaws. Take the Old Spice campaign. This campaign started out great on Youtube, but now the big-time advertisers are riding the wave of success and growing stagnant. They haven’t replied to any viewers’ comments. Worse, they haven’t stepped up their game since the launch of this campaign back after the Superbowl in 2010.
Second, each social media campaign is narrowly targeted to a specific audience and set of goals. The goals for your company aren’t going to be the same as the ones for the Old Spice campaign. Therefore, you will not get the same results.
The third and most important reason is that this campaign went viral because it had awesome content and was innovative. To quote Scott Stratten, “people share AWESOME.” And, there’s nothing awesome about mimicing someone’s else success.
Final Thought:
Instead of wasting our time mimicing the Old Spice campaign, let’s start challenging ourselves to be more creative and come up with our own new and innovative campaigns. Let’s come up with our own awesome content. That’s how we can create the next big social media success story.
