Who is in control of your brand?

In case you were living under a rock, the Old Spice commercial was first a YouTube success, followed by a TV ad, followed by a massive social media response campaign that got the whole world talking.

(Checkout the Old Spice You Tube channel to get up to speed, and how they wrapped up the campaign here)

The great thing about this case study, unlike many, is it highlights the impact on the bottom line.

Here’s the Old Spice campaign by the numbers, watch the video below for the background.

• On day 1 the campaign received almost 6 million views
  (that’s more than Obama’s victory speech)
• On day 2 old spice had 8 of the 11 most popular videos online
• On day 3 the campaign had reached over 20 million views
• After the first week old spice had over 40 million views
• The old spice twitter following increased 2700% (probably off a lowish base)
• Facebook fan interaction was up 800%
• Oldspice.com website traffic was up 300%
• The old spice YouTube channel became the all time most viewed channel (amazing)
• The campain has generated 1.4 billion impressions since launching the ads 6 months ago
• The campaign increased sales by 27% over 6 months since launching (year on year)
• In the last 3 months sales were up 55%
• And in the last month sales were up 107% from the social responses campaign work
• Old spice is now the #1 body wash brand for men.

One thing they missed was the number of searches for ‘Old Spice’ on Google, which increased nearly 1000%.

Here’s the video

But it’s not over yet

I agree with Niall, that it’s not over yet, the results of this brand shift will have a long term effect on their revenue and opportunities in the market, if they choose to leverage it.

And although the spoofs were rife throughout the campaign (even World Vision had a crack), they may continue to pop up.

Thanks to Aden at Digital buzz for posting this case study of the massive Old Spice campaign.

You’d think a mobile company like Optus would understand how people use mobiles, they’d also know what devices their customers use. Somehow they seem to have forgotten these two key pieces of information when doing today’s SMS campaign.

Here’s how it went

1. I’ve got an iPhone.

2. They just sent the following SMS promoting their iPad plans.

3. Good concept…

4. They promoted a webpage to view the plans

5. The webpage wasn’t compatible for mobile

6. Good concept but Optus DM Fail!

A simple solution & lesson for us all.

When sending an SMS to your database with a URL make 1 or 2 pages compatible for mobile.

And not to mention…

The SMS doesn’t even make sense, although I guess that’s what telecos do well… complicated bills and apparently now strange iPad plans too.

“…Get Unlimited Data within Australia for $50 recharge…”

When you look at the plan webpage there’s nothing about $50 or Unlimited Data.

I’m confused.

Stephen Johnson, from Draft FCB has just launched an interesting initiative to save 140,000 lives from Malaria. The initiative turns traditional TV & telephone fund raising on it’s head relying on individuals to pass it on.

You can donate through their website, or install a widget on your blog, forum, facebook page to encourage your mates to help raise funds.

Yesterday Toyota announced that they’d selected 5 advertising agencies to pitch for their social media activity where the community would determine the winners, the two best performing agencies would get more work in 2010.

B&T Today revealed last week that Toyota is running the social media pitch, pitting eight agencies against each other with four agencies then to go head to head with their ideas in the public domain. Following on from this, the two best will produce further work in the new year.

Background

Having worked on the digital account for Holden (held by Visual Jazz) for some time now, I’ve been keeping a close eye on who’s doing what. Interestingly enough, Toyota have recently been putting a lot of effort into Facebook – in particular – buying advertising and growing their fan base.

Toyota

They have also developed an application, called ‘Toyota Promise Forest‘, aligned with the Prius. The concept looks good, one of the best in Australia, however, it doesn’t work – and it hasn’t for quite some time. You’ll see when you use the app that YOUR NAME is TIMOTHY and the friends aren’t my friends, and you can’t actually use the app.

Now we assumed, when we first found the application, that it was new and being repaired, however, it’s been a couple of months now, and still it’s not working.

It makes me wonder why Toyota are ramping up their social media when their current efforts are so broken? That aside, how can you have 5 campaigns in market and effectively measure the performance of each activity separately? Would you run 5 TVCs at once to see which one works best?

Ford

I’ve also heard rumblings that Ford have also just selected an agency to roll out a social media strategy. Whilst at the same time they’ve developed ‘MyFord‘ a social media hub for their brand, however, it’s kinda broken…

Others

Lots of the other auto’s are in the space, but nothing noteworthy at this stage.

Summary: the Australian auto category will be an interesting one to watch in the coming 6-12 months

Started by channel101.com this 5 minute episode TV series is hilarious, well acted, directed & written, I wish I’d discovered it sooner. Good work Channel101!

Who are Channel 101?

The Unavoidable Future of Entertainment

Channel 101 is a monthly screening of 5-minute TV shows. It is a living, autonomous, un-televised TV network, that has been running since 2003. Here, you’ll find exclusive content including behind-the-scenes footage, outtakes, and original 101-based features. For good measure, we’ll put the Prime Time shows up here too.

FOX provided 4 case studies for reference, I was not involved in them I simply want to share them with you. I’ve also included a case study on the highly debated Pimp My Kettle Campaign at the bottom of this post.

The four presos cover campaigns Red Bull, My Name is Earl, Crest & Tourism Australia. They’re very basic examples, and difficult to measure ROI but it does illustrate the potential.

I have more case studies from various projects, get in touch if you’d like to get your hands on any.

This campaign is a personal favourite of mine as ‘the industry’ (whoever that is) got so stuck into it so hardcore, yet the campaign actually worked. A friend of mine was involved in the research and said that the focus groups showed that there was an increased perception of quality taste after the campaign, along with the stats in the YouTube video.

It’s not damaging or terrible but they’ll surely be losing potential fans because of it.

This advert appeared and appealed to me this morning, a $75,000 would be awesome!

So when I clicked through I’d expect big & clear instructions on how to get my hands on that $75k and probably see other people suggesting their ideas. But alas I didn’t, and it wasn’t until I returned to their page that I noticed a small piece of text explaining the situation.

So I went off to their website to see if I could find anything more about it… again I found nothing.

They paid for my eyeballs and I was ready to be converted, sign up and connect with Pringles, it was just all too hard. Also, people who organically found the fan page wouldn’t realise the enormity of the party competition.

Update: 21st September 2009

The campaign was still running, so I click on the ad and attempted to participate, and this time there was a page about the competition. I gave Pringles permissions to post messages to me, on my wall and to my friends (which is a big ask) and I was all ready to do whatever this campaign was but after I’d done all this I discovered the comp was over.

I’m guessing I had a pretty unqiue experience due to bad timing, as their fan page has increased from 90k+ to 240k+, a pretty good result.

What they might’ve done:

• wait until the comp was ready to announce
• use their fan page image & news feed to advertise the full details of the comp and what to expect
• added some information to their website about it
• created some way for me to signup via email or mobile to receive annoucements about it
• turnd off the competition adverts when the campaign was over
• changed the competition page to say ‘competition closed’ before I entered my details, not after

It’s laughable that the professional publishing industry often gets stuck into bloggers for being ‘unprofessional’ useless and adding little value when at the same time they make fairly monumental stuff ups like this! Let’s not let this slide, Digg this story: http://tinyurl.com/kvoqkw

The Daily Telegraph made two stuff ups:

1. They published the story below at 8:57pm, 33 mins before the final show had ended.
2. The incorrect winner was announced – it was Julie, NOT Poh

It even includes a series of quotes from Poh on what she plans to do, said to Julie and it goes on.

UPDATE: 20th July 3pm – Kathy from The Daily Telegraph responded on Mumbrella

But not to worry, now, when you Google ‘daily telegraph masterchef’ you get this blog post in position 4 & ‘masterchef daily telegraph’ at number 3.

Masterchef continues to smash Twitter trends, reaching position number 2 tonight.