The return of the Old Spice campaign has filled me with questions and interest.

What would they do differently to prevent a complete rehash of an idea that has been wildly successful?

The conundrum with this form of a campaign is to keep the ads fresh and evolving whilst not losing sight of continuity of the campaign. It is dangerous to fall into the "one trick pony" realm and just keep pulling out the same formula with a slightly different angle.

The immensely successful camapign last year avoided this by doing something very clever, it rounded out a relatively short campaign with hundreds of seemingly interactive answers to users questions directed at the Old Spice guy.
This did a couple of things. It directly engaged the users on the social media networks, and for a small time and creative investment, they also got to shoot effectively hundreds more commercials to keep the momentum up using the same idea without it feeling stale.

Very very very clever. In my humble opinion this was a game changer in the world of new media and viral marketing.

But what to do next with the second campaign? Tricky territory.

The first thing that the folks running the Old Spice campaign did was change the way the much anticipated first commercial was going to be released.
They announced via the plethora of new media (youtube / facebook & twitter to name the one's that I saw) that they would be releasing the new commercial via a super fan. They, and only they, would have the new commercial to do with it what they wanted.

That kind of prize offers a massive opportunity. The Old Spice commercials get massive audience. The commercials on the Old Spice channel on youtube have been viewed over 186 million times, and counting.
Imagine being the only person in the world with the commercial for 48 hours. What would you do?

A little while back Ashton Kutcher did something similar with his social media campaign for the movie he was promoting "The Killers". It was called the Killer Game, and you had to follow the clues on all sorts of social media platforms to answer a question at the end, the winner got a chance to have Ashton promote anything they wanted to his entire social media audience, which at the time was close to 7 million people - more than the population a lot of small countries.

The winner did nothing with the hugely powerful prize. They sent people to a youtube profile of themselves, bumped up their view count for their 15 minutes of fame and that was that. A whole bunch of people got to watch them making a fool of themselves on youtube and collectively utter "what a waste".......

So what would Old Spice do with the same sort of promotion?
How would they choose a super fan?

The answer it seems was carefully constructed. They chose a superfan that had created a simple parody clip.

So what makes this clip and user so special? We will never know. It is not out there, we just know that this guy is the super fan. Out of all of the parody videos on youtube they chose this one.

Perhaps it is all in the back story. A 16 year old kid that has taught himself how to be a designer and website manufacturer. From a PR exposure scenario, a 16 year old kid that may direct traffic to his own profile on any number of social media platforms, or to a personal website. A kid that is a good christian kid that is just out there in the world makings his way. A kid that offers no risk, and a kid that wont take the opportunity to kill it and make money off the back of it all, and possibly tarnish the launch.

Here is the phonecall that was, of course, recorded for an additional step in the campaign.

In the description of this video posted to the Old Spice channel:

My latest commercial is available to watch. That is If you're a 16-year old man person named Chris Gatewood. He's the only person who has it. If you'd like to see it, you'll have to ask Chris http://www.youtube.com/user/ShakeAndB...

Funny. So what does Chris do?

Post the video to his business website. That is all. You can see it here if you are interested I sure hope he got permission to use that Beyonce song!

For two days the only way to see the clip is via his personal website. Cool for his traffic stats.
Unfortunately he missed a golden opportunity. He didn't reach out to any advertisers to jump right in and promote alongside. He didn't contact any of the big movers and shakers with massive audiences and cut a deal & sneak ahead of the official release so that they could produce their own parodies.

He didn't do a lot of things that he could of with one of the years most anticipated commercials.
So successful has been this campaign that they did not even think they needed to get a superbowl spot this year, even though they released the commercial on Superbowl weekend with all of the rest of the big advertisers.

Granted it will be yet another massive campaign, as they have already shown, with some clever and ground breaking twists and turns. For my money, the commercial is not much of an extension on the last series. It is just as they left off, same character, same style, same formula.

Take a look for yourself.

Ground breaking, or just another old Spice commercial?