I am quite sure that if you are like me, always monitoring what is going on with Social Media and new online marketing trends, then you have seen already the Old Spice Media Campaign that basically exploded some days ago and it is now considered as one of the most popular viral campaigns in history.

What is this campaign about?

Well, Old Spice and its marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy hired Isaiah Mustafa, an ex football player and actor, to be the “ridiculously handsome” Old Spice Guy.  He appeared in a Super Bowl ad this year and continued the campaign by appearing in around 180 online videos answering directly to the users that have been posting or commenting about him in many social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Reddit.  Within the persons he responds to, there are celebrities and reporters.

The Old Spice guy recorded his video responses in rapid succession. His answers were a key mix of coolness and the stuff Internet memes are made of.

How it was done?

A team of “creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers” gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon to produce the videos. Organized by Wieden + Kennedy, the group tracked the questions that came after Old Spice solicited them.

Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden credits the close work between the technical and social media specialists and the creative team. “In the room there are two social media guys and a tech guy who built a system pulling in comments from around the web all together in real time,” he told Read Write Web.

“The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”

The numbers

According to Mashable, up to this Tuesday the numbers are:

* Number of videos made: 180+
* Number of video views: 5.9 million
* Number of comments: 22,500

Experts say that Wieden + Kennedy have set a standard marketing experts will admire and follow in the years to come. “This is the future of marketing”

More here:

http://mashable.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-social-media-campaign/
http://www.marketingvox.com/behind-the-scenes-of-the-old-spice-guy-campaign-047345
http://mashable.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-stats/

Is there something PR professionals can learn from dating sites? Sure! Those websites have been very successful because they commit to transparency and simplicity, in other words, users get what the site is offering, in a clear an expedited way.

This week Conversation Agent posted around this topic and highlighted 8 things PR people can learn from dating sites:

1. Clarity of intent – Dating sites are efficient and honest.
2. It is about people, not numbers – There is no “follower” count.
3. Simplicity rules – There are no complications, just easy steps.

For the rest, click here.

This video, produced and published at Vimeo by Scholz&Friends about two months ago, is really interesting to see how marketing has changed since the beginning of the past century until now. In the past we had few brands to choose from, and we were devoted to the one of our choice… today it is quite different.

Scholz & Friends: “Dramatic shift in marketing reality” – aka “A short history of marketing” … from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

The Inspiration Room has published a great collection of blogs focused on advertising and marketing around the world and sorted by country/region.  Check it out.

Random Culture has an interesting post about Quick Response Codes, which are being used extensively in Europe and Japan for mobile marketing campaigns.

 These codes, created in Japan in 1994 by Denso-Wave are being used in marketing for mobile users to take a picture of the code or read a the codes with the cameras to trigger action on their mobiles, it could be to download some piece of content, get a message or go to a website.

QR Codes might be placed in magazines, buses, signs, business cards to let users with the special software installed on the mobile to capture the image and executed the desired action.

For more information go to Random Cuture or the Wikipedia.