The Old Spice Man and the Future of Marketing
July 13, 2010You 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.
