Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 3:26PM Whitney Pratt, interactive creative director, is always on the lookout for great websites. And here's a find we just have to share:
I could spend all day discovering http://www.agencynet.com. Seriously. Fly the helicopter. #sitesthatmakemedrool.
-Whitney
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 3:10PM There's been a slew of sales-impact discussion floating around about the Old Spice campaign the past few days, and there’s certainly a lot of items to wade through.
Initial sales figures that made the rounds indicated that sales for Old Spice Red Zone (it’s just one of the Old Spice products, and it’s one the product Old Spice man holds in one of his earlier TV spots) had dropped 7% over a 52-week period that ended June 13, 2010 (here's one of the related stories).
Now, many companies aren’t fond of publicly releasing comprehensive sales figures, but Old Spice parent company P&G has released supplemental/additional figures for the Old Spice product line (I have to wonder if this is in response to the great online buzz about the Old Spice campaign not being effective.).
From a July 25, 2010 article in Brandweek:
According to Nielsen, sales of Old Spice Body Wash—the line touted in the Wieden + Kennedy-created campaign—rose 11 percent over the past 12 months and since the effort broke in February, sales seem to be gaining momentum.
Over the past three months, sales jumped 55 percent and in the past month, they rose 107 percent, also per Nielsen.
REWIND that – the past month – sales rose 107 percent?
Also sourced in the same article, The New England Consulting Group shows sales increases, too:
Gary Stibel, CEO and founder of The New England Consulting Group, said his data also shows a lift for Old Spice. “We think that Old Spice is up. We don’t think it’s up in the double digits, but it’s up meaningfully, and we think it’s driven 100 percent by marketing.”
And from P&G, parent company for Old Spice:
P&G rep Michael Norton said he believed Nielsen’s numbers were conclusive. “Since the ‘Smell Like A Man, Man’ campaign broke in February, Old Spice has month-over-month strengthened its market position,” said Norton in an e-mail. He added that Old Spice is now the No. 1 brand of body wash and anti-perspirant/deodorant in both sales and volume with growth in the high single/double digits.
The newer sales figures, released by Old Spice, are popping up in several industry articles, including:
Separating the sales impact of the viral campaign element from the TV spots is pretty much impossible on a definitive level, though certainly sales trending over the coming weeks will be under scrutiny (with the viral YouTube element breaking just this month).
And one can also argue that without a channel-dedicated, trackable offer, it’s hard to definitively connect specific sales results to specific marketing elements.
But, if accurate, these recent figures do seem to indicate an overall, positive sales impact from recent combined marketing efforts.
We’re going to have to allow more time to pass, and more month-to-month/year-to-year comparative sales data to be analyzed, for any final conclusions to be drawn, in even the most general scope, on the campaign’s success in terms of sales. And there are market factors to consider as well (such as if sales in the category increased overall, not just for the Old Spice brand). And understandably, some information may be proprietary to P&G.
But for now, in terms of sheer ENGAGEMENT, the campaign and its online viral/social components smell pretty darn good.
(I still have a social media crush on the Old Spice Guy)
(Shaun Amanda Herrmann)
Monday, July 26, 2010 at 1:54PM My Crush
Sometimes you run across an idea that’s so fun, so novel, so GREAT – you just wish you were the one that came up with it. Enter Wieden + Kennedy, the creative agency behind the fellow we simply call “The Old Spice Man.” In the midst of a second advertising campaign for Old Spice using actor Isaiah Mustafa, WK took the effort social in a YouTube video series that pretty much infected the Twitterstream the week of July 11 - not to mention the attention it also garnered on Facebook and YouTube.
The Particulars
Standing in a nondescript bathroom (somewhere in Portland, OR) and sporting a towel, the Old Spice Man responded to a wide variety of social media-fed inquiries and posts in a series of short videos that quickly became online conversation-fodder. In an interview with Mark Borden of Fast Company, Weiden’s global interactive creative director Iain Tait spoke about how they developed the online campaign:
“We knew it couldn’t be just responding to tweets in words, that wouldn’t have felt so special and had been done before. The fact that we were able to do this in video feels appropriate in relation to the prior TV ads.”
The Videos
According to AdAge.com, actor Mustafa delivered 186 video responses to both celebrities and everyday people. A few examples:
And there’s one I’m particularly fond of – one he did for a dog on Twitter. (I’ll admit bias on this one – he’s MY dog! But who can resist a BARKING Old Spice man?).
The Impact
Early reports don’t indicate a marked sales increase since the character’s launch in mid-February – quite the opposite, in fact.
I’d give it time. While these stats indicate a 7% sales decline, they don’t include any sales figures from retail giant WalMart, AND figures were only reported (so far) through June 13. The viral elements of the Old Spice campaign didn’t really take off til JULY 12: the @OldSpice Twitter account had just over 11k followers around 5pm EST on that Tuesday. The next day, same time? More than 65k. And at this writing? 93,748. Facebook? 704,415. And the YouTube views are TRULY impressive.
For now, it’s a wait-and-see game. As many can tell you – major brand shifts take time. The Old Spice brand had aged over the past several years, more staid than hip by any measure.
My dog and I (and certainly Old Spice parent company P&G, and Wieden & Kennedy) will be tuning in to see what future sales figures show.
Some of the coverage:
What's YOUR favorite video in the series?
(Shaun Amanda Herrmann)
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 1:59PM Declaring things dead—drawing lines of demarcation related to cultural and business trends—has become a parlor game of some allure over the past decade or so:
But what about logos—those brand signifiers that are the graphical representation of all that a brand encompasses? The design press of late has been laced with treatises from one or another expert suggesting that logo design will soon go the way of letterpressed ad layouts and rubber cement. Some say it already has.
Others have come to the defense of brand identity/logo design, highlighting its unquestionably significant role in the evolution of corporate communications, retail commerce and the larger culture in general, and the fact that, well, they’re still around and highly visible.
(A few brands have become so ubiquitous as to resort to experimenting with a rather bizarre form of stealthy “anti-branding" - like STARBUCKS)
While pretending to infallibly foresee the future beyond lunch tomorrow would be folly, the truth with brand identity as a distinct discipline surely lies somewhere between the extremes: Logos and logo design will remain a key—though perhaps gradually less significant—factor in the marketing communications mix for decades.
Understanding why requires a brief look at how we got where we are. Let’s state a couple of obvious things:
But we do.
The take-away: The relative gravitas of the basic logo and brand identity has gradually lessened with the onslaught of new media and innovative ways to support brands that have little to do with graphic identity in its narrowest sense. Will the next 10 years of change be as dramatic, or more so, as the last 30? If that question is answered affirmatively, the power of pure logo/brand identity as a discipline will probably be further diluted.
But will the logo die? Survey says: No.
(Doug Cook)
Brand Identity, Doug Cook, ND&P, corporate identity, logo development, logos, why have a logo in Creative Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 12:48PM Care for a King James cardboard crown with your WonTon soup?
Doug's Take:
A one-hour, prime-time special for a 26-year-old basketball player who’s never won a championship, instigated by “his people” for no other purpose but to announce the colors he’ll wear next season?
Really?
My initial response: the Old Guard NBA retirees should storm ESPN headquarters, forcibly wrest control and beam Bill Russell’s derisively puzzled image saying: “This is what it’s come to?,” followed by 59 minutes and 50 seconds of blank screen and a high-pitched tone.
(Full disclosure/disclaimer—playing hoops at a tiny private institution covered the cost of my college education, so ensuing opinions may be “envy-weighted”)
But wait, let’s remove our high-top Chuck Taylors momentarily (ecck, what’s that smell?) and consider a couple of sobering facts:
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock
China—with its runaway middle class, relentless gentrification and urbanism—is what this is really all about. Yao Ming is big, good and Chinese. But he’s injury prone—and he’s not Lebron. His limited success has only whetted the virtually insatiable “collective” appetite of our friends to the east.
Safe to say, the brand managers handling Brand Lebron slept restlessly last night, if at all--drifting in and out of a fever dream filled with the faint echo of a billion bouncing basketballs, wafting atop the steady “ch-ching” we all know to be international commerce.
(Doug Cook)