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"Charles Caleb Colton once said, \"Imitation is the sincerest (form) of flattery.\" Obviously, Mr. Colton was not talking about the success of the Old Spice campaign (seeing as how he lived during the 1700s), but we're sure he would have reiterated that sentiment were he to see how many spinoffs the aforementioned marketing miracle has inspired.\nThe campaign launched just over a year ago \u2014 centered around the theme \u201CThe Man Your Man Could Smell Like\" \u2014 and captured the imagination of the public. Case in point: The original ad has garnered more than 30 million views to date on YouTube.\nIn July, the whole deal kicked it up a notch higher with the Old Spice \"Responses\" campaign, an online blitz during which a team of techies, marketers and writers pumped out more than 180 personalized videos featuring \"The Old Spice Guy,\" Isaiah Mustafa, responding to questions posed by fans, bloggers and celebs alike.\n\"We were working with creative on a way to use Isaiah, who was very popular in the social media realm,\" says Eric Kallman, a copywriter at Wieden + Kennedy, the agency behind the campaign. \"Iain Tait [global interactive executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy] noticed how many comments he got on the videos,\" Kallman says, referring to YouTube. From there, the idea to respond to those comments was born.\nAnd that idea, incidentally, was extremely successful. \u201CIt was being able to interact with this guy,\" says Craig Allen, the campaign's art director. \"You can play with him like you can a toy.\u201D\nAccording to Visible Measures, \u201COld Spice Responses\u201D is one of the fastest-growing online video campaigns of all time. The company compares the endeavor to some of the most popular viral videos to date below, and how they\u2019ve grown over the course of 24 hours (to be fair, \u201COld Spice Responses\u201D had a time limit attached, so there was more urgency to participate with this particular string of videos than there was to get in on, say, the Susan Boyle craze). Check out the graph below for the details.\n\n\n\n\n\"This campaign revamped the awareness of Old Spice,\" says Kallman. \"People called Isaiah 'The Old Spice Guy.' It got people saying the name of the brand.\u201D It also, apparently, impelled people to start pouring money into the brand. In July, Brandweek reported substantial growth in sales of Old Spice Body Wash around the time of the \"Responses\" campaign.\nAnd if increased sales and positive buzz weren't enough, the original ad took home a Creative Emmy Award for Best Commercial of the Year. Not bad for a spot hawking body wash.\nThis success also earned Old Spice a legion of students, as it were \u2014 folks who cribbed ideas from the ads and applied them to their own marketing efforts. Mashable chatted with a few of these businesses \u2014 who have all enjoyed success from following the Old Spice model \u2014 about what aspects of the campaign worked for them.\nInteracting With Consumers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRegardless of your political affiliation, you've probably noticed that the White House et. al. have been ramping up their social media efforts of late, with the likes of U.S. President Barack Obama and former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs answering questions on YouTube.\nWell, the House Republicans followed this trend \u2014 working in their own Old Spice twist \u2014 following this year's State of the Union Address, recording videos after the speech that responded directly to Twitter questions and commentary via Majority Leader Eric Cantor's YouTube channel.\n\"The key [to the State of the Union] is the response afterward,\" says Matt Lira, director of new media for Cantor. \"Lots of reporters swarm to ask questions. So when we saw the Old Spice campaign, we thought it would work for us. The Old Spice campaign validates the community. Users liked getting responses.\"\nLira says the campaign was extremely useful for the House Republicans, and they would most certainly use it again. \nThis is customer service at its most immediate and entertaining, and although the GOP wasn't sporting a towel whilst delivering comments, we can see this model being very attractive to political parties and businesses alike in the future.\nLeveraging Influencers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of the reasons why the Old Spice campaign went so viral was that it targeted folks who were influential in the online sphere: people who would blog about it and share the videos on their own channels and sites (see: Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano, etc). Those people then acted as brand advocates (whether intentionally or not), spreading the gospel of Old Spice to their followers.\nHot on the heels of the Old Spice endeavor in July, Cisco decided to try out the \"Responses\" format in an effort to connect with its key clients and influencers via parody. (Sadly, the web at large \u2014 including Mashable \u2014- misread the parody as a blatant copycat attempt, and reacted scornfully. But we digress.)\n\"We didn\u2019t necessarily do a campaign, it was much more of a parody on it,\" says Doug Webster, senior director of service provider marketing at Cisco. \"We market very large, powerful routers and switches. Most of the issues that we deal with on our blog are very technical and very detailed. But we do try to mix things up a little bit, so we thought that it would be unique to send shoutouts to key influencers who read our blog regularly. It was meant to be a parody targeted toward those key influencers.\"\nCisco\u2019s mascot was not a hot man in a towel, but the rather dour-looking \u201CTed from Accounting.\u201D Cisco fans were encouraged to visit the Cisco Twitter accounts \u2014 @CiscoSPMobility, @CiscoSPVideo and @CiscoSP360 \u2014 and tweet at Ted with the hashtag #CiscoSPice. They could also comment on the blog in order to get a personalized video. In total, Ted made 19 videos.\n\"We got great feedback,\" Webster says. \"One of the [respondents] said he almost wet his pants. The campaign was full of inside jokes with them. It was a much more targeted area. I wouldn\u2019t necessary look at this as something that was intended to drive sales, because unlike body wash, we sell things that are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, it is important for us to have ongoing engagement with these key influencers.\"\nRevitalizing Brand Image\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI think we can all agree that prior to \"The Old Spice Guy,\" the brand mostly evoked thoughts of dad, grandpas and other less-than-sexy relations. By changing the face of Old Spice to a dude in a towel (and therefore appealing to women as well as men), the brand was revitalized.\nAndia Winslow, founder of ADUB365 FIT, decided to adopt the character of \"The Old Spice Guy\" for her own purposes: Creating a brand image for her fitness business that was sexy and aspirational.\n\"'The Old Spice Guy' is not only highly popular, but he is possibly one of the most recognized advertising characters in recent memory,\" she says. \"He is fine, he is fun, he is fit! I hired an actor to appear in my fitness video series to portray 'The Old Spice Guy,' and he too is all of the above! I wanted to portray both the fun and sexy side of fitness.\"\n\"My business is very new and my major goals for 2011 are to build brand awareness and industry credibility and to attract major sponsors and partners,\" she says. \"My goal, simply put, is to grow and engage my audience in unique ways. The OSG video \u2014 once posted \u2014 yielded more immediate response than any other in my series. Not only did it achieve more unique views in a faster period of time than any other, but viewers related to me that they 'watched the whole way through.'\"\nNow while we commend Winslow's ability to tap into current trends to leverage her brand, we wouldn't recommend making her \"Old Spice Guy\" a permanent fixture (seeing as how he is, in fact, \"The Old Spice Guy\"). However, the notion of connecting a fitting face to your business is one that the original campaign has proven to be successful.\nMaking Your Brand Shareable\n\n\n\n\nThe Old Spice ads are infinitely shareable \u2014 especially those featuring popular viral themes such as online marriage proposals \u2014 a concept that Brittney Maxfield, corporate communications manager at VitalSmarts, adopted when creating an Old Spice-themed campaign for the book Crucial Conversations.\n\"We wanted to 'ride the wave' of the Old Spice popularity,\" says Maxfield. \"We knew people would search YouTube for Old Spice content and wanted to take advantage of the key words and natural interest of potentially new prospects.\"\n\"Our audience loved our Old Spice parody geared to the holiday season,\" she adds. \"We had nearly 30,000 of our fans watch our video and we also invited them to share via their own social media channels.\"\nSince the video had to do with talking to your relatives during the holidays, Maxfield pitched Fox &amp; Friends a story dealing with that subject, and she offered them the parody. The TV show aired the video (sans charge of course), a spot that would usually be quite costly.\nIn this case, Maxfield created something that was marketable beyond the product she was selling, which makes the concept of advertising much more attractive to consumers \u2014 a concept that the original Old Spice campaign also embraced. In this way, her product message went much farther than traditional venues, reaching a much wider potential customer base.\n\n\n\n\nMore Business Resources from Mashable:\n- How Social Media Helped Toy Story 3 Win at the Box Office- Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign-  How Social Data &amp; Mobile Tech Can Improve the Retail Experience -  5 Creative Facebook Places Marketing Campaigns -  Twitter for Brands: 6 Winning Strategies to Learn From "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/16/old-spice-imitators/>