With more than 100 million views in six days, Kony 2012, a 30-minute documentary about Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, has become the most viral video in history, according to one researcher.
In a blog post, Visible Measures found Kony outpaced other record-setting viral videos. For instance, the video featuring Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent in 2009, hit 70 million views in six days. Old Spice’s “Responses” campaign didn’t hit 70 million until five months after it launched.
Visible Measures got its figures by tracking not just the original Vimeo version of Kony, but also responses to the video. By March 8, three days after Kony went live, there were 200 such responses, which ran six minutes on average. The video has also netted more than 500,000 comments.
Despite the rapid rise of Kony 2012, the video has brought a shower of criticism to Invisible Children, the organization behind it. Many of the negative critiques have been targeted at Invisible Children’s practices as an organization, not whether Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is a war criminal.
In particular, a Tumblr blog called Visible Children, outlined how just 32% of Invisible Children’s money went to direct services, while the rest went to staff salaries and other overhead.
Invisible Children responded with a blog post outlining its expenses. The post didn’t dispute the 32% figure, but illustrated how another 26% went to “awareness programs.”
Each day, Mashable highlights one noteworthy YouTube video. Check out all our viral video picks.
Old Spice is continuing its experimentation with new approaches and rotating spokesmen with a new campaign breaking on YouTube and Facebook that features Terry Crews’s exploding head.
In the video above, Crews, a former NFL player perhaps best know as Julius, the father on Everybody Hates Chris, declares that Old Spice Body Spray will make you feel so powerful “It will blow your mind right in front of your face.” Then, Crews’s head splits open and his brain flies away, leaving him to spout gibberish.
The “Smell is Power” campaign from ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, hits TV on Saturday. Josh Talge, Old Spice brand manager, says the brand wanted to reward fans with an early glimpse of the new ads. The campaign promotes the Red Zone sub-line of body sprays. Talge says Crew was chosen because he epitomizes the idea of power. Though the brand is best known these days for spokesman Isaiah Mustafa from 2010′s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, it has used various spokesmen of late, including a September ad featuring a sea captain.
This isn’t the first time Crews has starred in an ad. He appeared in a series of Old Spice commercials in 2010, concurrent with the Mustafa campaign.
In a new twist, however, other Procter & Gamble brands will be featured in the ads. In coming weeks, ads for Charmin Freshmates and Bounce Dryer Bar will be interrupted by Crews, who will literally burst through the tableau to make a pitch for Old Spice.
What do you think of the new ad? Sound off in the comments.
Each day, Mashable highlights one noteworthy YouTube video. Check out all our viral video picks.
Old Spice is continuing its experimentation with new approaches and rotating spokesmen with a new campaign breaking on YouTube and Facebook that features Terry Crews’s exploding head.
In the video above, Crews, a former NFL player perhaps best know as Julius, the father on Everybody Hates Chris, declares that Old Spice Body Spray will make you feel so powerful “It will blow your mind right in front of your face.” Then, Crews’s head splits open and his brain flies away, leaving him to spout gibberish.
The “Smell is Power” campaign from ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, hits TV on Saturday. Josh Talge, Old Spice brand manager, says the brand wanted to reward fans with an early glimpse of the new ads. The campaign promotes the Red Zone sub-line of body sprays. Talge says Crew was chosen because he epitomizes the idea of power. Though the brand is best known these days for spokesman Isaiah Mustafa from 2010′s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, it has used various spokesmen of late, including a September ad featuring a sea captain.
This isn’t the first time Crews has starred in an ad. He appeared in a series of Old Spice commercials in 2010, concurrent with the Mustafa campaign.
In a new twist, however, other Procter & Gamble brands will be featured in the ads. In coming weeks, ads for Charmin Freshmates and Bounce Dryer Bar will be interrupted by Crews, who will literally burst through the tableau to make a pitch for Old Spice.
What do you think of the new ad? Sound off in the comments.
The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. Ad agency JWT has used mobile marketing for two brand name clients. During a marketers’ panel discussion, John Baker explained the important role mobile played in a promotion for Zyrtec and for a campaign across media for Macy’s.
Maybe advertisers should stop hoping that their new campaigns should be super-successful and instead wish for them to be moderately well-received.
After all, almost no one has been able to create a second act for ad campaigns that become cultural touchstones. Remember Budweiser’s “Wassup” for instance? That campaign broke in 1999, but only lasted for a few more executions. The “You’re getting a Dell, dude” guy also wore out his welcome, fast.
If anything, adding a social media layer to a successful campaign only raises the stakes as bloggers, Tweeters and Facebookers pile on to celebrate and watch to see if new ads live up to the set standard, then mercilessly scold it for not doing so. Such was the situation Old Spice and ad agency Wieden + Kennedy found themselves in in the fall of 2010.
By then, Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign had already received heaps of industry accolades, including the Cannes Film Lion Grand Prix, and it had broken new ground by having spokesman Isaiah Mustafa star in hundreds of YouTube videos, responding by name to bloggers and fans who tweeted comments about the campaign.
“It was definitely daunting,” says Jason Bagley, a creative director at Wieden. “It was both the best and worst spot to be in,” adds Craig Allen, another creative director. After batting around ideas, Bagley, Allen and other creatives on the account at Wieden decided that instead of abandoning the campaign or risking repeating themselves, they’d use Mustafa’s character to create a storyline. In this case, it was sort of a riff on the classic 1950 drama All About Eve. While that film featured a wide-eyed ingenue usurping the role of an aging star, it was decided that a long-in-the-tooth star would try to steal Mustafa’s spokesman role.
But who would play Mustafa’s foe? The first name that came to mind was Fabio Lanzoni, the Italian model who is better known by just his first name. After all, Fabio had performed a role similar to Mustafa’s in ads for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter that ran in the ’90s. “Fabio was the first name that popped up,” says Allen, “but we assumed he didn’t want to do it.” In preparation for rejection, Wieden decided they would plan to tap other short-listed candidates David Hasselhoff and Dolph Lundgren. It turned out, though, that Fabio was on board.
Upon meeting Fabio, Bagley and Allen soon discovered why. “He has a great sense of humor,” says Bagley. “Something we learned is that the Fabio you know from TV is a character. We thought maybe he was going to be this cheesy metrosexual model, but in reality he’s a guy’s guy.” Months after the shoot, the three would even become friends with Fabio and visit his home in Los Angeles, where they would sample Fabio’s 300-deep motorcycle collection.
With their villain on board, the agency concocted a loose storyline in which Fabio was jealous of Mustafa’s popularity and wanted to challenge him for the throne. The brand unleashed the first of the Fabio ads on YouTube and on TV on July 20 with no explanation. On July 25, Fabio laid out his “Mano a Mano in el Baño” challenge to Mustafa at “9 a.m. tomorrow, Internets.” The next day, Mustafa accepted.
That week, over a three-day period, Mustafa and Fabio would shoot more than 150 videos at Wieden’s Portland, Oregon, headquarters. As Bagley recalls, the crew went in with just a vague idea of a plot and no ending. The idea was to incorporate fans’ comments (including Mashable‘s own Pete Cashmore) into the storyline, but that wasn’t as easy as hoped. “We were kind of freaking out the first day,” says Bagley. “We weren’t shooting enough video.”
Eventually, they found a rhythm. Part of it was playing to each actor’s strengths: Mustafa got the verbose, absurd speeches while Fabio’s responses were kept short. As for an ending: A fan named Jordan S. suggested that Mustafa should build a time machine to prevent Fabio from trying to take his place. Bingo! They had their denouement.
When the dust settled, the campaign looked like a winner. Overall, it netted more than 22 million YouTube views in one week. Old Spice and New Old Spice Guy Fabio held the number one and number four spots for most viewed channels for the month on YouTube. Old Spice rep Andrew Nicolai says that’s the first time that’s happened, a claim that a YouTube rep confirmed. Other measures were also impressive: The campaign drew more than 53,000 YouTube comments and 68,000 new Facebook fans.
Did it sell more Old Spice? Mike Norton, a rep for Procter & Gamble Male Grooming (Old Spice is a P&G brand), says Nielsen figures show it did, though he declined to share exact numbers. But the campaign also solved a problem for the brand. “We set an objective to engage fans the way we did last year,” says Norton. “We didn’t want to try to do the same thing.”
Mission accomplished. But what about next year? Soon, the Wieden team will be brainstorming concepts for summer 2012. Meanwhile, the brand has experimented with a new campaign featuring multiple spokesmen, including a sea captain (or a guy who wants to be one). Rather than get worked up about 2012 though, Bagley and Allen are savoring the moment, at least for now. “l always fear that people aren’t going to care and wonder if they’re going to engage,” says Bagley. “We’re really happy that millions of people have done just that.”
Series supported by IDG
The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. Mobile marketing is projected to grow rapidly in the next few years as marketing catches up with the surge in mobile device use. It’s a new, experimental platform to reach consumers. JWT executive John Baker told marketers at a panel discussion in New York how JWT used mobile for two of its clients. Watch the panel discussion here.
"I'm setting the example, and it's going to be puzzled over and studied and followed, from now on." - John Doe, Seven.Although Wieden + Kennedy had a very different aim than the homicidal "John Doe" character from David Fincher's thriller Seven, this is probably what the advertising agency behind Old Spice's latest marketing campaign must be thinking right now.The campaign, in which the "Old Spice guy" -- as actor Isaiah Mustafa, who starred in most of Old Spice's recent commercials, has come to be known as on the InternetInternet -- ended today. In his final tweet and video, Mustafa says, "like all great things this too must end."And then he catches a giant fish that falls from nowhere.The team behind this amazingly well-run campaign managed to engage half of the Internet, and provoke almost unequivocally positive results from social media sites such as Redditreddit.com and TwitterTwitter. Hell, even the comments on YouTubeYouTube were overwhelmingly positive -- and that never happens. The Old Spice Twitter account accumulated tens of thousands of new followers and the YouTube videos amassed hundreds of thousands of views.Everything was run perfectly. The Old Spice guy recorded his video responses in rapid succession, an amazing feat in itself that cannot be truly appreciated if you've never been in front of a camera. His answers were a key mix of coolness and the stuff Internet memes are made of. The actual brand -- Old Spice -- was never shoved down viewers' throats. Most importantly, all of it was incredibly fun to watch.The team behind the campaign took great care to engage celebrities, influencers, common folk and popular social media sites in balanced quantities. And it knew exactly how to talk to them. In his penultimate video, the Old Spice guy talks directly to his daughter, explaining that until recently, he was just a struggling actor no one has ever heard of. When was the last time a marketing campaign spoke directly to you in such a frank way, making you laugh and cry at the same time?Wieden + Kennedy have set a standard marketing experts will admire and follow in the years to come. This is the future of marketing.
Maybe advertisers should stop hoping that their new campaigns should be super-successful and instead wish for them to be moderately well-received.
