من سوار بر اسبم - چگونه ادویه پینگ پونگ بازی می کند؟

CHAPTER SIX

I’m on a Horse: How Old Spice Played Ping-Pong, Then Dropped the Ball

Unless you were living under a rock, you probably saw at least one of the Old Spice commercials starring Isaiah Mustafa that began airing the day after the 2010 Super Bowl. With this campaign, Procter & Gamble, Old Spice’s parent company, showed the world how a brand can play a kick-ass game of media Ping-Pong.

First, it started with outstanding content, spoofing every stereotype of masculinity they could come up with through clever writing and picture-perfect casting. As soon as a bare-chested Mustafa finished gliding around from one paperback-romance scenario to another, reassuring women that even if their man didn’t look like him, they could smell like him if they stopped using lady-scented body wash, millions of people rewound their DVRs and watched the ad again. And again. Then they started talking about it on Facebook and Twitter and making spoof videos on YouTube.

Thanks to the TV ad, millions of people—women, especially—now felt something for Isaiah Mustafa, and were linking his manly abs to the Old Spice brand. So, five months and a second TV spot later, when P&G marketers used Twitter’s promoted trend ad platform to ask Old Spice followers on Twitter and Facebook, as well as users on Reddit and Digg, to submit questions for the Old Spice Man, they replied enthusiastically. People voted for their favorite questions, and the winners received personal replies from the Man himself. Old Spice Man also initiated contact with celebrity influencers, including George Stephanopoulos, Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, and Kevin Rose, who, not coincidentally, happen to have large Twitter followings. The Internet went wild as people found out they could talk directly to the man who could ride a horse backward and catch a birthday cake while sawing through a kitchen. Over the course of two days, Mustafa taped about two hundred real-time videos responding to fans’ questions.

Play to the Emotional Center, but Not to the Middle

Corporate America and many private businesses like to live in the middle. The middle is safe. The middle is often quantifiable. And you can reach a lot of people in the middle, as you can see in this illustration:

Yet very little in the middle is often memorable, and what is memorable is what sticks. Stories and ideas that catch us off guard, make us pay attention, and show up where we didn’t expect them—those are sticky. Sticky stories are the ones that get carried forward, permeating the barrier around the middle and reaching far more people than you’ll ever find in that limited space.

You can use a traditional media platform such as television, but marketing victories lie in the extremes, the things that make people look up from their iPads or BlackBerrys and say, “What the heck was that?” Quality content is king. Always. But from now on, quality content must be followed up with quality engagement. You had better be ready and waiting to engage your consumers online when they start googling and tweeting and facebooking to find out more about the awesome content they just experienced, because that’s how our consumer culture works now. Anyone marketing in the Thank You Economy has to stay aware of where the culture is going, and go there.

The Old Spice campaign wasn’t cheap. The production values were high for video, the actor cost money, a team had to keep track of all of those mentions of Old Spice zipping around the Internet, the scripts were being written by four writers as fast as the questions came in, and the whole thing started with a multimillion-dollar TV ad buy. And yet, the company decided to spend additional money on promoted tweets, a brand-new and completely unproven Twitter advertising channel. What that indicates is that someone in the company, or at Wieden and Kennedy, the ad agency they were working with, understood one of the major Thank You Economy principles: it is worth casting a line into micro-trend ponds; they are less crowded, less noisy, and less expensive than the bigger ones in which everyone else is fishing. In the TYE, these small ponds will appear with greater and greater frequency. The likelihood is that they will dry up quickly, too. But when used properly, micro trends can provide a fresh channel by which brands can tell their story to a new audience. First-user advantage matters more now than it ever did.

Did the Campaign Work?

It depends on whom you ask. For example, sales of Old Spice Body Wash, which were already on the rise, rose sharply—by 55 percent—over the three months following the first aired TV commercial, then soared by 107 percent (a statistic that included me, because I bought my first stick of Old Spice during that time*) around the time the response videos began showing, but some seem to question whether the uptick might have been due to a two-for-one coupon promotion rather than a well-integrated social media campaign. There are two things we do know to be true, though:

1. The earned media was fierce. Practically every marketing and tech blogger, and almost every media and news outlet in the country, covered the story. The value and reach of that media coverage has to be worth far more than a bunch of full-page print ads in Maxim or Cosmo.

2. Old Spice’s YouTube channel reported more than 11 million views and over 160,000 subscribers. Eleven million impressions—not the worst number I’ve ever seen. And, Proctor & Gamble now has data on 160,000 people they didn’t have before, and they can use that data to remarket to those consumers. How much is it going to cost them this time? Zero.

Could a smaller brand with a lesser budget have pulled off the Old Spice campaign? Yes and no. If the talent was there, absolutely. However, we can’t underestimate the weight of the millions of dollars the company spent in creating opportunities for the public to form an emotional attachment to the Old Spice Man. But Old Spice could have spent twice what it did, and if the talent hadn’t been as strong, nor the writing as smart, the ad would have been forgotten as soon as it had run, assuming it was even noticed at all. A brand that spent only $30,000 and got fewer fans wouldn’t necessarily lose if it invested in a relationship with each fan. Follow-through counts for a lot in the Thank You Economy.

Tony the Tiger, are you paying attention? How about you, Ronald McDonald? Why aren’t more iconic brands leveraging the opportunity to talk to the people who love them? That said, it’s not about the budget, it’s about the creativity and the caring. Any brand, big name or no name, can benefit from posting personal videos; it doesn’t need to have the production values of Old Spice. Any brand can write fantastic, surprising content. Big brands don’t have a monopoly on making social media that sticks.

To recap how Old Spice brilliantly executed one-on-one engagement:

It established brand equity on TV with fantastic content.

Ping.

Then it extended the compelling story to Facebook and Twitter

Pong.

And to Digg, Reddit, and several other smaller ponds

Ping.

Whose users went to the big YouTube pond to see the videos

Pong.

Where they experienced a level of a brand’s personal attention and engagement that has rarely, if ever, been seen before

Ping.

And then tweeted and commented like crazy about it

Pong.

Which garnered coverage for the campaign on television, in print, and on radio, making Old Spice, your grandfather’s brand of deodorant, national news.

The Huge Miss

The Old Spice campaign is considered a huge social media win, one that hundreds of social media experts have praised, but here’s where the story takes a bit of a surprising turn. I was sure that Old Spice planned to use the information it has on its almost 120,000 Twitter followers* to start engaging with each and every one of them on a personal, meaningful level. Every one of those people should have received an email, thanking the followers for watching the videos and offering them a reason to keep checking in. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I don’t think that happened. As of September 2010, almost two months after Old Spice ambushed Twitter, the Old Spice account has tweeted only twenty-three times, and not one of the tweets talks or interacts with an actual person or user of the brand. Ad Age published an article that begins “Old Spice Fades Into History…” If I were captain of that ship, you can bet that ten thousand tweets would have gone out since July 14, the last day of the response video portion of the campaign. To me, it looks like Old Spice is a sprinter stuck in a traditional marketing mind-set, not a marathon runner living in the Thank You Economy.

So the answer to the question of whether this campaign worked depends on whom you ask. Ninety-nine percent of the market would probably say that it was a social media win—it caused buzz, it resulted in a fantastic amount of earned media,* and ultimately, sales did spike. Ninety-nine percent of market, however, doesn’t realize that we’re in a Thank You Economy, and it is using old media standards to tally up its victories. So yes, the campaign did win—it won the same way a traditional commercial wins. But it could have won more if Old Spice had seen the initiative through.

Old Spice thought when the campaign was done that they were done. Huge mistake. A social media campaign in the Thank You Economy is never done! The Thank You Economy rewards marathon runners, not sprinters. All P&G needed to do was sprinkle a little bit more pixie dust by humanizing their business and ensuring long-term relationships with their customers, but they gave up. In doing so, they turned what had all the markings of a superb social media campaign into a one-shot tactic.

Old Spice saw a major spike in sales and brand awareness, but there are plenty of brands that have done great marketing, spiked for a while, and then disappeared off the consumer radar. The brand had an opportunity to continue the conversation with all of those people who connected with them, and they squandered it. They left their customers behind, limiting the full impact the campaign could have had on the brand. I’m sure there are more than a few people who were miffed when they could no longer interact with it. Worse, though, are the many, many more who simply forgot about the brand, and about how much fun they had interacting with it. It will cost Old Spice a lot to reengage those people.

I’m in utter shock. On one hand, I am devastated to see this turn of events and want to call Old Spice and beg them to let me help get them back on track; on the other hand, they’ve given me a great opportunity to show you how a brand can sabotage a great social media campaign.

I was going to buy another stick of Old Spice when I used up my first one, but the wind has been knocked out of my sails. I mean, what their silence on Twitter tells me is that they’re through with me. They’re glad that I, and thousands of others, spent our money with them, and now they’re just going to sit back on their laurels, enjoy the spike in revenue, and move on to a new campaign.

I hope one of Old Spice’s competitors is reading this right now. Old Spice had a huge chance to turn 120,000 strangers into acquaintances, and maybe even friends, but as of this writing P&G made it pretty clear their interest in their customers goes only skin deep. Now is the competitor’s chance to show people how a brand really cares about its current customers, and the ones it would like to know.

When I started Wine Library TV, I was the only game in town, and I built a pretty loyal following by constantly engaging and conversing. Later, I watched some competitors try spamming or otherwise reaching out to my customers and fans, trying to poach my business. They failed, because I already had my customers’ hearts. As my business grew, however, and it became harder to provide the same level of one-on-one engagement my fans were used to, I could see on Twitter that some relationships were starting to form between certain of my customers and my competitors. When I stopped working as hard on my relationships with those people, a new guy was able to come in and steal them from me. It’s no different from the married woman who comes home from having a fun night of after-work drinks with a colleague to find her husband so immersed in his video game he can’t even break away to ask her about her day. Is it any wonder that she eventually falls for the other guy? As it goes in life, so it goes in business. You have to keep working at every relationship in your life, whether personal or professional.

Maybe I should give Old Spice the benefit of the doubt; it’s possible they’ll have gotten back in the trenches between now and the time you read this book. I hope so. Even if they do, though, they will have lost out on a ton of potential long-term business, and will have to work much harder to regain the momentum they once had.