I saw a line today, where the past ended and the present began…
The past ended on April the 1st 2010, and the present began immediately above it on the 5th February 2010, as you can clearly see half way down this page.
Below that line, the advertising world, as far as anyone could reasonably tell, seemed to consist of people desperately trying to segment and understand ‘the market’ and then frantically shouting for attention.
Above that line, the world is home to a new Man in a Hathaway Shirt (do not let the bare chest fool you!) A man completely at ease in his environment; he stands there without a trace of bewilderment - a master of the eclectic surreality that continually washes over us, able to play with it, able to act as a conduit for its craziness, his perfect identity processing it with ease and serving it back to us enhanced and nuanced, in a way that speaks to our frontal cortex (at last!) instead of our reptilian hindbrain like they did in the past…
Iain Tait, the driving force behind Wieden + Kennedy’s change in approach, self-effacingly says there’s no magic to what they’ve done. And he’s right, it’s all very obvious if you’re standing on one side of the line, but completely unfathomable if you’re standing on the other. I think that’s what generational shifts are like.
The thing that amazes me perhaps the most about it is that Old Spice have left the earlier campaign videos there. Great that they have (even though I think they damage the brand for all those new people who have found their way to it over the last couple of days) because it provides such an insight - you can see their *workings*, see the ideas they were trying out before getting it just right.
It gives hope that even though what you are doing is crap, something brilliant may be just there waiting to emerge…
So do click back through the videos - it’s not often you see a generational change so clearly.
Update 16/07/2010:
WeAreSocial have done a good intial analysis of the publically available numbers. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if the campaign essentially fails as far as the numbers go (it is *Old Spice* after all!), but I think it will have lasting significance because it’s the first campaign in which both the medium and the message of a mainstream brand are unapologetically aimed at Internet culture.
Update 10/02/2011:
And here’s the vindication of the campaign presented in a lovely infographic by Shelby White in Fast Company. 1.4 billion (wha!!!) impressions and a 55% sales increase. Nuff said.
