The Old Spice Man: A Traditional Triumph
The viral success of The Old Spice Man campaign prompted Craig Reiss to parse its success factors and explain how companies of any size can apply them. His dissection offers breadth and many practical insights. Here’s the link: http://blog.entrepreneur.com/2010/07/lessons-from-the-old-spice-man.php
There’s a “meta” lesson, too. Created by ad agency Weiden + Kennedy, the campaign was conceived as entertainment. It handled the Web accordingly—as TV but in near real-time and two-way—and the work itself was genuinely entertaining.
Entertainment is not a core competency in interaction design. Its prevailing paradigm assumes a purposeful user with her own intentions the fulfillment of which drives her further interaction. Assuming a purposeful user doesn’t rule out but does militate against entertainment. The prevailing paradigm also assumes optimization: a steady stream of user data informs ongoing redesign that in turn yields continually improving results. Optimization and entertainment are not antithetical but they are apples and oranges.
My somewhat ironic take-away is that the type of talent capable of creating a campaign like The Old Spice Man may more likely be found among the creative staffs of ad agencies where entertainment is the prevailing paradigm than among digital experts.
What about gaming? I would presume that gaming sub-set of interactive designers to be among the most influential in entertainment today — a la television series Lost, the summer blockbuster movie Inception, the “videogamization” of televised sports, and the genre of immersive video games, themselves. The entertainment value of gaming interaction design is so powerful that virtually every capitalist creator is bending over backwards to incorporate interactive gaming mechanics. I would refine your argument to suggest that the core competency of most traditional ad agencies is entertaining in mass, passive contexts. In the case of W+K and Spice guy, they hit that nail on the head.
W+K also did something else, which is occasionally a core competency agencies and brands: they effectively integrated passive and interactive contexts across traditional and new channels.
On an ROI level, I believe there was a greater impact per impression (i.e., a YouTube view holds far greater intention than a passive television view); however, most brands still operate on an all-impressions-are-equal model.
Also, I question how replicable great work — like Old Spice guy — truly is.
Lastly, Old Spice is a staple, but I much prefer Clubman Pinaud when I’m in the mood for studly fragrance. I think that’s due to the reminiscent associations it holds with my favorite barbers over the years.
Hello, Max
Thanks for the critique. You raise some good points.
You challenge my definition of entertainment, arguing that its scope should include gaming. Fair enough. Certainly, my post would have been more accurate had I written “mass” and “largely passive” entertainment.
At the same time designing a game is about setting up a set of conditions and rules that enable challenge-achievement-progress, challenge-achievement-progress, and so forth. The Old Spice Man work is not a game and it’s unlikely a game designer would have ever conceived it.
Thanks for calling me on the carpet for being vague. In the future I’ll be more careful to define my terms more precisely.