The ‘Old Spice questions’ campaign is creating a buzz in the marketing and ’social’ media arena. Stemming from the original commercials ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ a Facebook page was created where people can ask the Old Spice character a question and he will respond directly to your question with a short witty YouTube video. This is a very humorous and super viral use of social media. The campaign has received a staggering amount of views in such a short time. Old Spice, marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy and actor Isaiah Mustafa are collaborating on the project.

With Hundreds of video responses viewed more than 4 million times and with over 20,000 comments posted and growing daily, the quick turnaround of responses to the questions is amazing. ReadWriteWeb have a description of the response process on their website.

A team of people are behind producing the short comedic YouTube videos, responding to the questions about Old Spice - in real time. The video responses drive brand awareness, positive brand perceptions and what it does for brand engagement. They have created custom video responses in order to communicate directly with individual fans in an engaging, real time, and broad-reaching fashion. This demonstrates how a brand can personalise its communications via social media.

This campaign demonstrates how a brand can loosen its guidelines and standard procedures and trust in its agency and partners to produce such a successful and talked about campaign. Congratulations to the production teams for their creativity, flexibility and innovation, and to Old Spice for letting go and taking the risk to gain that all-important point of difference in what is considered a saturated market.

Other brands can learn from this campaign and experiment with ways to communicate with consumers directly and personally using the opportunities offered by ’social’ media. Extended with further automation tools to further limit moderation on the part of the client/agency, the campaign demonstrates high value.