Old Spice has turned their “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad campaign into a viral sensation by having the “Old Spice guy” respond to people’s comments and tweets via videos which were posted on YouTube (click on the response videos on the right) — my favorite is below. The move has gotten quite a response, but only time and sales will tell whether it was successful for the brand’s bottom line. Sales can a bit of time to react, but there are some measurable effects that can give insight into how the ads are doing now.
Mentions & Brand Awareness
People are definitely more interested in the Old Spice brand in the past week or so. As shown by the graph below, mentions of “old spice” have spiked in the past week with barely a blip before in the past 30 days.
Searches for “old spice” (and related terms) have also gone up in the past week — starting probably with the upload of the new commercial, and then increasing as people became aware of the video responses, which have been shared vigorously via Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.
Takeoff
How the campaign went viral can be seen a bit by looking at the statistics available with each individual video on YouTube. For example, on the first video response posted:
Here are the associated stats:
You can see how the video’s popularity increased & what sites it was embedded on (and how many views it got). Interestingly enough, the video was most popular with men, their buying audience.
Interactions
While its a bit more difficult for an outsider to see this information, the number of interactions with the brand can be measured via the number of tweets, comments, posts, shares, etc. from a combination of sources. Old Spice can also see how many people have subscribed and viewed their content (in total) since the start of the video responses — this info is available to anyone, but you’d have to do a bit of spreadsheeting to get it all and Old Spice would presumably have access to previous numbers to know how these increased.
Back to the Sale
As brilliant as these commercials and viral videos have been, it all comes down to whether or not they helped increase sales. While it’s difficult to pinpoint directly whether there was an effect, Old Spice should see a lift in sales after the videos and the weeks to come, which is most likely attributable to this campaign — you’d have to take a look at all the numbers to make a more educated conclusion.
Thoughts?