CHAPTER 9
Marketing
Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.
—P. T. Barnum
At the time we are finishing up this book and getting ready to send it off to the publishers, there is a social media campaign that is getting a lot of attention. By the time you read this, people of the future, you may well be sick of it. By the time you read this, we will know what the bottom-line value of this campaign was to sales. But for now, the Old Spice campaign is the hottest thing to hit social media marketing since the last thing.
Built on the success of a TV commercial that debuted at Super Bowl XLIV and then went viral on YouTube, the integrated social media campaign stars shirtless ab merchant Isaiah Mustafa. Created by advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, the social media campaign was built around dozens of personalized YouTube responses recorded by Mustafa in response to all kinds of people who mentioned Old Spice on Twitter and Facebook. And not just people with lots of followers like Ashton Kutcher and Alyssa Milano.
The campaign achieved staggering results, driving more than one million views on the first day, increasing Twitter followers by several thousand percent, shooting up the number of Facebook “likers” (nearly one million as of October 2010) and, most important, boosting sales more than 100 percent in the month after the campaign began.
Old Spice followed up quickly with a voice mail message generator, a Web-based tool that allowed fans to enter their own phone number, select from ...
