The Lesson of Old Spice: TV is Simply a Starting Point

If you were anywhere near almost any social media tool earlier today, you probably heard about the remarkable personalized response videos from “the Old Spice guy” (“I’m on a horse, backwards”). It started in what seemed like a one-off, then quickly picked up steam as short, quickly produced personalized videos started popping up with Mr. Old Spice, clad only in a towel, replying to tweets, blog posts, Facebook comments, and YouTube replies from all over the Web.

In some cases, such as with the actress Alyssa Milano, she tweeted and got her own response video (several actually) with an hour or so (and the wide-eyed optimist in me is hoping that part wasn’t staged in advance). All in all it gave the impression that a small creative team from Weiden+Kennedy were camped out in a small stage (or hell, a large bathroom) with the actor and some live social monitoring tools, creating what will go down as one of the best examples of integration between advertising and social media yet seen.

There are a lot of lessons to be had – the value of engaging with the community and how you shouldn’t just aim for the celebrities but engage with fans across the board; the power of realtime social media monitoring tools; the impact of smart humor; the potential payoff from brands that are willing to take risks; etc.

What resonated with me however is the idea that this stunt, more than any other I can recall, cements the fact that the once-glorified 30 second TV spot is no longer the epitome of advertising – it’s merely a starting point. TV is now more than ever simply one channel, among many, to seed your content out into the marketplace, so it can be built on and blown out through creative use of new social channels like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

This isn’t a new idea, of course, but sometimes it takes a truly creative campaign to shock your eyes open to both the reality and the possibilities of all the new toys we’ve perhaps grown too used to. Hats off to the team at WK and Old Spice, today was definitely a pleasant and exciting jolt and a hint of what’s to come.

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