As one of the most talked about marketing and ‘social’ media news pieces this week, we expect the Old Spice custom video responses to serve as a case study for some time; a case study in how a brand can personalize its communications via social media, or how a brand can loosen its guidelines and standard procedures – and increase its trust in its agency partners – in order to communicate directly with individual fans in an engaging, real time, and broad-reaching fashion. While it’s too soon to tell if it will serve as a case study in driving sales – at least in the short term – it was likely never meant to. The most interesting case study may be in how the video responses drive brand awareness, positive brand perceptions (no longer a stodgy old brand your grandfather wore?) – and what it does for brand engagement.

With respect to numbers – Mashable provided some basic metrics on what imprint the campaign made (and this is since TUESDAY):

Number of videos made: 180+

Number of video views: 5.9 million

Number of comments: 22,500

Mashable also provides some perspective on the impressions made, or number of views generated by the video responses, in comparison to both the original spot/campaign, and to other popular virals (including Obama’s victory speech). In short – the Old Spice responses killed it.

Many of us also found ourselves asking how these videos were produced so quickly. ReadWriteWeb developed a very informative description of Wieden + Kennedy and Old Spice’s process. We tip our hats to W+K’s creative and production teams for their creativity, flexibility and innovation, to Old Spice for letting go of traditionally stringent CPG creative approval processes and trusting their agency partners – and to actor Isaiah Mustafa for his impecable delivery (and stamina).

We hope to see brands learn from this campaign – and to see them experiment with ways to communicate with consumers directly and personally – in the wider-reaching public platform offered by ‘social’ media.

[via Mashable and ReadWriteWeb]