So you know the “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” Old Spice campaign everyone was ROFL’ing about a month or so ago? Turns out it wasn’t all poop and giggles. According to Dean McBeth, a Wieden + Kennedy digital strategist speaking at the 140 Characters Conference in San Francisco today, the campaign has received 1.5 billion impressions since its launch in February, including 130 million video views. Twitter followers are up 3200%, according to McBeth. Google searches are up 2200%. Facebook interactions are up 800-1000%. And traffic to the Old Spice Web site is up 350-500%.
OK fine. But what about actual business impact? According to McBeth, sales of Old Spice body wash have gone up 55% in the past three months. Some SKUs, he said, are up as much as 1900%.
After the jump, a look behind the scenes at how W+K produced all those video responses.
One of the most impressive parts of the campaign—which included TV spots, print ads, and online display ads, as well as social media—were the real-time responses to comments about the campaign that users were posting all over the Web, including the famous YouTube video responses featuring The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, aka Isaiah Mustafa. McBeth explained a bit about how they were done.
We had two full days of real-time—creatives, digital strategists, community managers, developers and editors all siting in the same area at the same time….
We built a platform internally, that we called NORAD, that essentially allowed us to pull in comments from all over the Web. We answered questions on Digg, on Twitter, on Yahoo Answers… and Facebook. These were prioritized by existing narrative, by some form of clout, and their creative potential—as they came in, the writers said, “I want to write to that.”
The creatives wrote the scripts. We sent those scripts to the teleprompter. Isaiah did shots, sometimes in a single take. Those were exported to editors, uploaded to YouTube, and then posted in Twitter…. All in under 15 minutes per spot.
McBeth said his favorite response was the one to ABC newsman George Stephanopolous (which, incidentally, has over 900,000 views so far). McBeth said the creatives asked him, “‘Is this OK? Can we do this one?’ And I said, ‘You mention the President, the White House, and Congress. You make fun of [the President’s] abs. And you use [the words] “monocle smile.” [Pause] Go ahead.'”