Old Spice Advertising

Old Spice has been dominating viral marketing for years now and also has managed to stay relevant more so than any other ad. campaign in recent memory. In fact Old Spice commercials are the most viral advertisements even today. So how? How did an advertising campaign for a men’s grooming brand become so massively viral? How is it that this campaign filled with seemingly random and silly commercials managed to propel Old Spice’s sales forwards tenfold? How did Old Spice manage to capture the attention of the audience, how did it make itself stand out among the thousands and thousands of advertisements?

“No way as the way” - Bruce Lee
A very dominant trait in early Old Spice commercials, namely “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” starring Isiah
Youtube is a largely untapped gold mine for company advertising, it was extremely unorthodox for a large company like “Old Spice” to base their campaign on such platform. Even when big companies do work off of youtube, they do not utilize it to the extent Old Spice does. These other companies may skew their ads in before a video, or on a banner on the side of a page, however Old Spice created a channel just for their advertisements. Not only that, Old Spice came out with steady content on their channel which all had overwhelming positive response. This differentiates their channel from other advertisers. Instead of seeming like a large company trying to sell goods to you through forced views of their advertisements before the video you really want to watch, Old Spice makes itself seem like a content creator. By doing this Old Spice has successfully disengaged their videos from advertisements, and ascended to a form of entertainment. This along with the constant high quality, will keep the viewers in high suspense to see what the channel releases next. In a way, Old Spice has made watching their commercials like watching a video from your favorite youtuber. Instead of building an obvious seller-buyer relationship, Old spice managed to build a celebrity-fan
The company asked it’s audience for requests and comments which Isiah can respond and reply to. In total 186 videos were made of Isiah responding to the fans, his responses were all in character. Through these responses the company was making conversation with their fans/customers. With this Old Spice managed to gain a reputation of not only a company but also a content creator which cares about it’s fans and the quality of it’s content. Again using the youtuber analogy, getting a scripted reply from Isiah is like winning a youtube giveaway or having your question answered in a Q and