Not your typical post, I thought the following ad was interesting and worth sharing.
This social experiment was conducted in a townhouse complex using hidden cameras. Even though this was created in Johannesburg, similar results have been found in other places. Both eye opening and disturbing, it makes you wonder if all the neighbors assumed some one else would get involved. While most don’t want to get in the middle of things, the cops are there to intervene. Regrettably, they didn’t show up during the social experiment either. Had this been a real incident, I can only think that someone might be in need of help.
The advertisement was created by Ogilvy in South Africa and is called POWA, or People Opposing Woman Abuse.
Do you want to smell the success of a social media campaign that will engage your audience to no end? Swan dive, into the best social media strategy of your life.
But first, let’s have a look behind the scenes with the most recent social media success story.
Old Spice and advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, along with actor Isaiah Mustafa, partnered to create a campaign that took the web by storm. After introducing the Old Spice Man character (played by Mustafa) the team proceeded to seed various social networks with an invitation to ask the dashing shirtless man any questions they may have.
Using reddit and twitter, the responses were tracked carefully and those that contributed interesting questions or were submitted by high profile individuals on social networks received a video reply that was posted on Youtube.
A team of creative’s, marketers, and writers made about 87 short video replies in the first 11 hours. That works out to about 7 minutes per reply, including writing and filming. And an astonishing 180 videos in total were made during the entire campaign. The entire campaign was tweeted, retweeted, emailed, and shared on Facebook multiple times. Mashable provides a look at the Old Spice campaign by the numbers.
So what was it about the campaign that made it the success it was? One interesting point to note is once the original ad (above) was released, there was no brand mentions with the 100+ video responses. It was simply entertaining to watch and most already knew it was the Old Spice man.
The big take away to this success story is how the integration of several social media options were used together. It allowed the marketers to seed, engage, respond, and viewers to submit, view, and share.
While this was one helluva marketing and production feat, its easy to see how combining the social media options helped. But like many viral or social campaigns, the big idea and the seeding will likely determine the results.
Social media is much more than creating a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. You have to think about how to engage with your network. If you simply broadcast, you want to do so with value, such as promotional offers or news of new products or sales. But for most that don’t have legions of fans like Apple or similar, you want to share and engage. Offer info of value.
Social media contributes to online branding, reputation management, awareness, word of mouth, and more. It creates a huge opportunity, but as Seth Godin says; it’s a process, not an event.
