Everybody loves the Old Spice campaign. Including me. But I wish it was less of a campaign and more of an ongoing initiative.
Old Spice made a huge splash last year with their traditional and online video campaign. They deployed a perfect mix of paid, earned and owned media, investing millions of dollars in traditional advertising to activate the program. The level of engagement was extremely high, everybody talked about Old Spice and wanted to hear from them. And then they disappeared.
The brand has a decent presence on Facebook, still engages the audience weekly. Twitter is filled with almost funny one-liners, nothing really interesting or worthwhile sharing. Clearly, Old Spice believes it can just use the platforms as a traditional medium – blast out the message, make it a bit social and that’s it. Instead on building on the success of their integrated campaign and developing a year-round initiative, they let it fizzle out. It’s such a waste not to engage with your 120,000 followers on Twitter constantly. Many companies would drool over 120,000 followers.
More importantly, the current use of Twitter will be problematic in the years to come. Currently, it’s written from the perspective of Isaiah Mustafa. What happens if you the campaign changes and there are new Old Spice heroes. Can you just change the tonality from one day to the other? Shouldn’t the Old Spice Twitter feed be used for valuable information that’s timeless and not closely linked to a campaign?
Many people still claim the Old Spice campaign was a Social Media success. I would argue, it’s a sad waste of attention, social capital and goodwill.
uwehook 
The fundamental problem is that they’ve created a campaign and a mascot instead of a narrative and a character. Where it gets flat is that it ends up being more commercials in social networks rather than building a story.
Absolute true, Michael. And the longer the campaign continues, the emptier and flatter it feels.
Unfortunately, this was a traditional campaign wrapped in new media clothing. It was a funny comedy bit launched with lots of TV spend and fueled by the short burst of real-time videos. But it was all designed to end in the short-term rather than start of long, sustained commitment to interaction.
The root of the problem is that brand and agency consider media still as an expiring commodity, not a sustainable platform.