With a fragrant, dashing man in a towel, Old Spice put on a viral video tour de force yesterday. Collaborating with actor Isaiah Mustafa, better known as the man your man could smell like, Old Spice unleashed a deluge of new clips on YouTube. The clips feature Mustafa responding to questions from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and blogs in as close to real time as you can get with online video publishing. (ReadWriteWeb has a great post on how they did it.)
Mustafa Responds to His Own Tweet
The viral video coup ran for about 24 hours, and then, as all things must, it came to an end. All told, Old Spice had uploaded an unprecedented 180+ clips for its campaign, which, in total, have generated over 5.9 million views and 22,500 comments.
Old Spice Responses is the latest effort in the string of ads for The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, which launched mid February this year. The original ad has attracted nearly 19 million views to date. Old Spice followed it with The Return of The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, which premiered just a couple weeks ago and has already reached an impressive 6.9 million views. In all, Old Spice has been red hot in online video of late, taking four of the ten spots on the Top 10 Viral Video Ads Chart this week. You can read the latest results here.
As long as we've been measuring online video, we've never seen anything quite like the Old Spice Responses campaign. There have been ads that have challenged audiences, Samsung's YouTube Challenge and Tiger's Jesus Shot come to mind, but there's never been a campaign that's been so personal, so quick, and so prolific.
In fact, Old Spice Responses is one of the fastest growing online video campaigns ever. We took a look at some of the most explosive viral videos we've measured, including Bush dodging Iraqi shoes, Obama giving his electoral victory speech, and Susan Boyle, and found that in the first 24 hours, Old Spice Responses outpaces all of them. Now, that's fast.
How high will the view counts run for this innovative campaign? Only time will tell, but we'll definitely have an update for you next week.