The Advertising Equivalent of Live Blogging

The social media campaign to support Old Spice flew into overdrive as the team from Wieden + Kennedy and Old Spice holed up in a studio in Portland, Oregon with their writers, production team and actor Isaiah Mustafa. Their idea was brilliant: Produce personalized responses to @replies on Twitter, comments on the “Talk to OS Guy” tab on their Facebook page, YouTube channel and other places around the web and quickly post them to the Old Spice YouTube channel with supporting Tweets.

Today they shot and uploaded 89 videos. Yesterday it was 29.

Yes, that’s right, 118 personalized videos in less than 48 hours. Think of the marathon that the writers and production team just accomplished, not to mention the focus that Isaiah Mustafa needed to maintain character for so long.

Indeed I think @jordan_ferguson was right when he suggested on Twitter that July 13th be renamed Old Spice day.

Leveraging the Numbers

As buzz grew around the videos on Twitter, the heavy-hitters started commenting. Creating the opportunity to push more attention to the campaign, reply videos soon appeared for mainstream celebrities @aplusk, @ryanseacrest, @Allyssa_Milano and @rosemcgowan. Media outlets @TheEllenShow, Perez Hilton, @GQ, @Gizmodo and Huffington  Post received some attention. Even @Starbucks got in on the action.

Tech celebs weren’t missed either, with replies going out to Twitter co-founder @biz, @guykawasaki,  and three get-well videos for Digg founder Kevin Rose, ill with a fever.

Calculated responses to grab the most lift, for sure. But there were still one-hundred videos speaking directly to people with modest followings that were as well crafted and funny as any meant for those with big reach.

And, ultimately, none of it would have worked if the videos weren’t funny and inventive. The writers deserve kudos for their nimble feat which managed to make me chuckle throughout the day, despite being in the depths of a miserable summer cold.

Meta Moment

Things got a little strange when the Old Spice character sent a reply video to the actor’s own Tweet.

This type of engagement too.

Here’s one that the team turned around in a few hours that makes an interesting story for one couple.

More Spicy Goodness

All the response videos.

Did You Know and Boat are the two 15-second spots that compliment the two more well known 30-second spots.

The making of the I’m On A Horse commercial, including an interview with writers Craig Allen and Eric Kallman.

What do you think of the campaign? Have you watched any of the response videos? Share your favourite in the comments. (My fave is the one they made around a horse hiding typo.)

Update: I neglected to mention that the @oldspice Twitter account had approximately 7,000 followers on the morning of July 13th. Now, 24-hours later, their account stands at almost 35,000 followers, a 500% increase.

Update 2: On the morning of July 16th, @OldSpice has almost 72,000 followers.

Update 3: ReadWriteWeb has a piece on how the Old Spice videos are being made.

(Click the green button to autoplay all videos in sequence or select the thumbnail to play individual posts.)

At the same time I was sitting with Shel and Joe, Brian Solis of FutureWorks had a lengthy guest post on TechCrunch on PR Secrets for Startups. This led Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur to take a stance that PR is overpriced, irrelevant and ineffectual for start-ups; instead, he feels getting involved in the community is all that’s really needed. This sparked a lively debate on whether there is even a need for PR with all the social media tools widely available. Everyone from Robert Scoble to Stowe Boyd were chiming in with their thoughts, generating hundreds of comments in the blogosphere, and detailed clarification by Solis.

It seemed everywhere I turned this week, someone was bashing PR and marketing, using the terms interchangeably with equal distaste. (Look here and here for the difference.) The general feelings were that PR and marketing folks have lied to people for so long, that they are no longer to be trusted. And that authenticity and transparency, the tenets of social media, could never possibly be adopted with any reliability by the flacks and hucksters in PR.

All of this negativity towards PR leaves me wondering if poor practices have irreparably injured public relations as a whole. If PR has truly changed with social media, perhaps they’ve done a really poor job of convincing people of that. Or maybe these are still early days and the changes have yet to be proven.

This period in the evolution of PR reminds of what was happening in the advertising industry in the early ’70′s. Back then, advertising as a profession was seen as “innately immoral”, where no standards of conduct were in place and a wild west mentality threatened to have the whole industry regulated by governments. Advertising took steps to become self-regulated. Is PR at the same stage now?

(Update: The Phreadz embedded player has changed since originally posted. Click on the green arrow to play the entire conversation in order, or, click the thumbnails to view individual responses.)

Additional resources mentioned in these videos:
Background on Truth in Advertising: The Robert A. McAlear Memorial Award
Will fake business blogs crash and burn?
The Worst Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007

So, tell me: what do people really think of PR? I’d love to know.