You know when your friends are making jokes based on a commercials, then that is a successful ad campaign. That’s how it was for me with the recent Old Spice commercials. I didn’t quite realize the pure brilliance of this marketing scheme until today.
Old Spice created “The OId Spice Man” – a purely masculine character in every way: “what every woman wants and what every man wants to be.” Sure, it was mostly way over-the-top and ridiculous, but the caricature, which is what he really is – not a believable character in truth, was something very understandable nonetheless. Not that people could identify with him, but they could fully understand him and who he was.
Sure, they could have stopped there with a definitely funny and memorable ad campaign, but Old Spice stepped up it’s game on this one.
By starting to respond to individuals using YouTube, individuals who simply wrote about Old Spice, the ad campaign became pure brilliance. After creating this character, they can continue down the path of original and outrageous mini-commercials by following the overly-caricaturized model.
What made me realize the brilliance behind all of these commercials was how tailored they actually are. Specifically, the response to a Reddit user. Not only was the answer to chmowm’s question great in itself, it was as though it were addressed to the whole Reddit community because of the type of response it was, something Reddit users would find especially funny. And, by singling out the whole group, instantly there are more fans than there would have been. This is not to mention the picture shout-out to Reddit as well.
And that’s where the brilliance lies – this caricature is replying to individuals, but often those individuals are part of a group other people identify with, winning them over, too.
I was recently talking to a friend who had not begun to partake in Foursquare and was trying to explain it. She was excited, but then had a few questions fundamental questions about it.
It got me thinking about what Foursquare talks about being and what people generally use it for.
From Foursquare itself, there isn’t much of an indication what it’s used for. Sure, there’s a learn more page about Foursquare, but really, despite giving the how, that doesn’t say why.
Yes, it does say that you can meet friends out at places, but sadly, there still aren’t many people who use the geolocation service, mostly because of the fact it is a geolocation service. Obviously, there are major privacy concerns and with recent events like Facebook’s recent privacy woes, a lot of people can get scared quiet easily.
Personally, the only time I’ve gotten a text from someone in my area, was when I was traveling up to Boston, and a friend noticed that I had checked into the bus station just before him. And even so, we couldn’t meet up at the time. It was so close to being a Foursquare meet up.
What Foursquare quickly becomes, more than anything, is a recommendation service. Whether that’s through people actually recommending places, or recommending them involuntarily by going there often. Which is why small businesses should do all they can to promote Foursquare. Whether it’s promotions, or just encouraging people to check in, the benefits from friends’ recommendations are straight-up tremendous
There’s a new site that’s been being sent around for a few days now, Launchlist. There is one main issue with it: instead of focusing on why not to launch a new site, you should focus on why to launch a new site.
It’s far too easy to get bogged down in the details of what else do I need to launch a new site. Granted, when you have a major site already in production, that is a different scenario and you’re going to want to go through a full set of testing. However, when it’s something new, it’s easy to get distracted by things that ultimately will not matter.
The 28 items that Launchlist recommends are great items to accomplish with a site, and really should be part of every site. But, when it comes down to it, many things can be eventual goals. Like support for Opera and larger resolution testing. Sure, those things should be on the to-do list, and yes, I am a big fan of Opera, but the fact is it’s not a high percentage of users who will be affected, so is it really worth delaying a launch because of that?
In the day and age of modern web development, it’s very easy to put out new releases when you need to update. The stringent testing should always be there, but in an agile environment, it’s easy to update something on the fly and roll out a new version for all users, so why give someone a reason to not launch?
