Two Years after Super Bowl 2010 Old Spice Ad: P&G reduces TV ups Digital Marketing

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Old Spice Commercial

It took two years and 39+ Million YouTube views of the Old Spice commercial of Super Bowl 2010  for  P&G to announce that it needs to cut back on traditional advertising and  focus more on digital marketing.

Marketers worldwide revere P&G simply because many of the old world marketing concepts like “Brand Management” was invented by P&G. If it took 2 years for P&G to come out and say clearly that digital marketing needs more emphasis – I guess no other organization needs to feel defensive  for their slow action on digital and social media marketing !

Here are  some thoughts on the original Old Spice Ad that went viral during the Super Bowl of 2010 -exactly  two years ago this Super Bowl week:

  • The Old Spice Ad was brilliant. It was discussed endlessly on TV  talk shows and made its due appearance in the marketing and advertising classroom.
  • It reached above 3 million views right after the launch as this CBS morning news  segment  of February 2010 suggests.
  • But the Old Spice Ad’s popularity has been mounting as we can see from the ten fold increase in two years to 39+ million views on YouTube alone. According to Chairman and CEO  Bob McDonald the impressions are 1.8 Billion for the whole campaign. And yes they are free.
  • On the sales side Old Spice has extended its product offerings to a variety of deodorants and more shelf space at Wal-Mart. Sales did pan out hugely from the Old Spice Campaign and rose 27% within six months of the campaign start.

It’ll be interesting to know how the trajectory of views of  the Old Spice 2010 commercial grew. Keep in mind that this trajectory and growth was helped by Facebook and social media also.

Obviously unless your TV ad is great it can’t become viral. However, you don’t really need to spend hugely on  broadcast TV advertising but rather on the back end creative and production to improve chances of viral social sharing.Either way ,P&G’s clear stance on digital marketing in the consumer product mass market  signals great growth of digital marketing in all categories of products and service.

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