Old Spice Campaign ROI - Week 8 Activity

Look at your keyboard. Now back to the screen. Now back to the keyboard. Now back to the screen. Fortunately, everyone knows where this is going. Look down. Now back up. Where are you? You are still in the same place about to read a blog about Old Spice's ROI (Return of Interest).

For those who are unsure of what Old Spice is, it is a brand of male grooming products. In 2010, Old Spice launched an advertising campaign Smell like a Man, Man. The whole point of the campaign was to make everyone talk about the brand and to answer questions made by the fans with the usual of social sites like Facebook, Twitter and mainly YouTube. In the end, 186 video messages were made answering fan's questions and comments with an estimate of more than 65 million views. Below is the original Old Spice ad.

If we look at the Return of Interest for Old Spice during this campaign, it would look something like this:

• According to sites, the campaign cost about $11 million.
• On day 1, the campaign received almost 6 million views
• On day 2, Old Spice had 8 of the most popular videos online
• On day 3, the campaign had reached over 20 million views
• After the first week of old spice had over 40 million views
• Subscribers to the YouTube channel went from 65 000 to 150 000
• The number of people following Old Spice on Twitter increased 2700%
• Facebook fan interaction was up 800%
• Oldspice.com website traffic was up 300%
• The Old Spice YouTube channel became the all time most viewed channel
• The campaign has generated 1.4 billion impressions since launching the ads 6 months ago
• In the last 3 months, sales were up 55%
• In the last month, sales were up 107% from the social responses campaign work
• Old Spice became the number one brand 

After doing a bit of research, we can calculate and estimate how much they earned by using social tools. According NLSaha, YouTube partners can earn:

• Subscribers: A youtube partner will get paid $0.05 per subscriber. If a person has 100,000 subscribers for example, they they will have made $5000. 
• Channel views: A youtube partner will make $0.01 per channel view. If a channel has 1,000,000 channel views, the person will make $10,000. 

Therefore,

• After 1 week, Old Spice would have earned $400 000 from channel views (40 million x $0.01)
• Made $7500 from YouTube subscribers (150 million x $0.05)
• To date, they have 247 368 066 channel views which equals to $2 473 680.66 and 424 648 subscribers which equals to $21 232.40. All these are rough estimates from VidStatsX as it may not include multiple uploads of the same video.
• Other elements could have also increased the money earned from these videos like affiliate advertising.

We can also see from the above points that the brand name has spread like wild fire on other social sites increasing the product sales. The strengths that came from this campaign were:

• The cost of producing video content was significantly less than for a TV shoot. This means that content was easily accessible to the viewers and watched at their own discretion. Competitor 'Axe' spent approximately $30 million according to different sites. 
• By uploading content on YouTube, they were able to make use of the original fan base and also a place to make extra money with ads since there videos gained so many views.
• They connected with other well known people like Ellen DeGeneres and Perez Hilton, who had larger social followings, to make the word spread faster online.
• They focused on social tools and pages which already had a fan base. This encouraged commenting and sharing in the community.
• The most important part was creating traffic amongst all social sites and getting the name of the product to increase product sales in store.

Although it is not officially stated, the Old Spice campaign gave a very success ROI as the brand did become the #1 brand with the use of social tools to increase all forms of sales. Thank you for reading and leave a comment if you have a favourite Old Spice video. Check me out on my page if you like what I do or find me using all that social jazz!