Proctor & Gamble has been producing daytime dramas for over 70 years — that’s why they’re called “soaps” — and its last show, As the World Turns, went off the air in September. Now the consumer products giant says it’s shifting a lot of that money into social media, in part because of the massive viral success of its “Old Spice” campaign.
Those “Smell like a Man, Man” commercials starring Isaiah Mustafa became a YouTube sensation, racking up 40 million views and boosting Old Spice’s Twitter followers by 2,700 percent. P&G says the campaign yield 1.8 BILLION impressions — the number of times that people saw, read or heard about the commercials — and sales is up by double-digits. (Here’s a great story on how the Old Spice YouTube campaign worked.)
Part of the reason the Old Spice campaign was so successful is it fired on all cylinders at once: TV, YouTube and Twitter. TV provides mass awareness, social media fuels conversation and participation. Clearly a little more progressive than soaps.
