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Old Spice Sees 107 Percent Sales Boost from Social Media

 

Posted on July 28, 2010
Angela Natividad

 

Earlier this month, Old Spice Guy appeared on Twitter and YouTube with a hyper-viral series of personalized responses to fans. Little time has passed since, but for a hot minute blogs and "thought leaders" infested the waves with what they called Old Spice’s "dirty little secret": sales were down, Old Spice guy fails, wah.

The sites typically cited SymphonyIRI’s reported sales figures for Old Spice’s Red Zone After Hours product, which itself saw a 7% drop. But the 52-week period from which this stat was gleaned concludes at June 13th, while the personalized video campaign began on July 13th. So while you could make some generalizations about the TV campaign, you couldn’t really correlate the drop to the YouTube/Twitter effort.

With help from Nielsen, this week the blogosphere’s telling a different story. The stage is set by Visible Measures, who observed Old Spice Guy’s viral vids spread faster than Susan Boyle and President Barack Obama’s victory speech.

Since then, Nielsen’s revealed some validating statistics, paraphrased by AdWeek:

"[Overall] sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent."

Tough to argue with a breakdown like that, but some say the leap in sales can also be attributed to a coupon blitz that took place at the same time. As Joe Jaffe put it:

"It’s hard to determine how much of [the 107% sales hike] was due to an aggressive couponing campaign which was in market simultaneously, but directionally, there does appear to be a correlation between creative resonance, social momentum and sales."

Bear in mind we see nothing wrong with supporting hardcore brand campaigning with a concurrent direct marketing effort. We’d call it a thorough marketing strategy.

Total range of the Old Spice Guy campaign starring Isaiah Mustafa* breaks down thus:

o Mustafa’s 4 TV commercials, 30 million views on YouTube since February

o Old Spice’s Twitter, now at 95,573 followers (from a paltry handful of a thousand prior)

o Old Spice’s Facebook, nearly 719,000 fans

o Total upload views on Old Spice YouTube page: 117,429,622 (it is also the #2 most-subscribed publisher of all time, #1 most-viewed this month and #1 sponsor most-viewed this month)

o Fan interaction rose 800% (per Procter & Gamble)

To celebrate this objectively magnificent spicy-man coup, we give you Mike Relm’s dangerously sexy Old Spice Remix, featuring random mashed-up footage from The Man Mustafa himself:

We have beamface!

Special thanks to Clément Brygier of Culture Buzz France for additional data points.

— -

*The Mustafa element is a lot more important than people realize. In the last three years Old Spice has been through a number of manly-men that invert and ironicize its old persona, including the infamous Bruce Campbell. But it was Mustafa’s "unique character" that caused the ripple effect, per Wieden + Kennedy’s global interactive CD Iain Tait, who calls him (disturbingly but honestly) "an incredible property."


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Comments

1. Saturday 31 July 2010 attime 11:24, by Allan :: http://allantyoung.com

Outstanding. Now every social media guru will point to the Old Spice campaign as the reason for their clients to spend money on social media.

How strange for the prospective client to see the same case study from every potential agency, consultant, or service provider that pitches them.

2. Tuesday 3 August 2010 attime 10:41, by Leena :: Leena

In today’s day and age all you need is if for your ad to catch in the social media networks.

If a company creates content like old spice did then it is bound to go viral. This is a great branding strategy.

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