What happens when you give your creative team lots of freedom?

July 26, 2010 | Posted by Carolyn Pikoulas
On July 13, Old Spice went live on the airwaves (well, the Internet-waves) by creating over 80 short, funny video responses to social media users, all in real-time. It was the type of campaign that was unheard of until now, and it had created an unprecedented amount of brand buzz in a single day. How did they do it?

It was truly a collaborative effort between a talented group of copywriters, creative directors, programmers, social media experts, and video producers. Gathered in an undisclosed locale in Portland, Oregon, the team leveraged Twitter, Facebook, and blogs by inviting users to pose questions to the Old Spice character, played by actor Isaiah Mustafa. All the responses were then tracked, and the most interesting questions were personally responded to the user, by name. The videos had responded to people like Digg founder Kevin Rose, TV star Alyssa Milano and many other random people, famous or not.

The campaign was well done, well received, appealed to peoples' egos, and (more importantly) created a very personal level of branding, even if the videos weren't directed to everyone. The videos became an immediate Internet sensation. You may have even caught wind of it from your Facebook's News Feed, as I had.

Old Spice's parent company Procter & Gamble had given their creative team a simple set of guidelines but was largely left out of the decision-making process of creating the videos. The company had put its trust in its creative team, and they successfully ran with it.

At the end of a very long night, Mustafa gave us his final word before riding into the sunset on his "jetski lion":