Observations In Changing Social Media Behavior: The Old Spice Guy Duel

While the final results are not yet in — and the battle continues, we couldn’t help but notice (as much of the industry is suspecting) that this year’s campaign lacks the sense of innovation, break-through – not to mention the glowing reception, that last year’s ‘Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign did. While the idea is theoretically cute, we sense a practically lukewarm reception. New Old Spice guy Fabio has amassed about 7,450 followers on Twitter since the teaser campaign first broke last Friday, while Old Spice Guy Isiaiah Mustafa still holds strong with about 136,000 followers (which he’s had much more time to accumulate). Some of the current, personalized videos have accrued views totaling up to the hundreds of thousands, while last year’s award-winning campaign still claims personalized videos with views up to the millions. Of course, the time it’s had to accrue those far exceeds that of the days-old current campaign.

That said, we still sense – judging from the type, frequency and volume of responses we’re non-quantitatively seeing – that this year’s reaction is temperate compared to last year’s fury. Until the full results are in to prove us wrong (or until further research can confirm our suspicions), we can only hypothesize that the less than site-crashing reactions could be due to:

• A more sophisticated, broader Twitter audience already still has a population of earlier adopters that saw this last year — personalized, real-time Twitter and YouTube responses were innovative the first time — but perhaps not as much the second time ’round
• Humor alone does not create engagement. When an audience has already been exposed to it, it may require a different type of call-to-action, or incentive, in order to persuade a sophisticated, advertising-weary audience to engage on behalf of a low-involvement product (deodorant and bath products)
• Much like Hangover 2, perhaps the formula is not sufficiently differentiated or surprising to generate a change in behavior?
• Are we so quickly accustomed to the ways of social media that it takes more to rouse us out of our current personal/utilitarian behaviors in the space, in order to react to what a brand is requesting us to do again?
• Was this meant for a different target audience than last year’s campaign? In other words, as members of the industry that responded positively to last year’s campaign, are we simply not the ones that this campaign is intended for? Was it instead meant for that incremental audience that wasn’t exposed to the brand awareness and engagement campaign across social media last year?

The jury is still out on this campaign’s performance. Perhaps we’re wrong and the campaign is outperforming our impressions/assumptions, or doing exactly what it was designed to do (like reach an audience that was not an active social media participant last year); we simply want to open the discussion and learn from the brand about what they’ve learned about their fans’ and target’s behavior from this campaign. Thoughts and responses are of course, very welcome.

Old Spice Challenge