The brilliance of Wieden + Kennedy’s Old Spice marathon has been written about at length. For me, it’s the best example of content meets social we’ve seen. But it’s something that happened around it which got me really thinking: Old Spice Voicemail.

For the unfamiliar, here’s a short summary. A user called Pandarr on reddit requested an answering machine from Old Spice Man to which he replied with this video:

Then another user on reddit commented:

Dock

Couple of hours later, http://oldspicevoicemail.com was live. Since then, there have been countless blog posts and tweets, just about Old Spice Voicemail. It is its own media earning machine.

There’s a couple of really interesting things going on here.

1-) The idea is not too far off from something you can imagine an agency creating around a successful property. iSimples, the meerkat soundboard app got to No. 1 on the App Store in the UK. If Old Spice Voicemail was produced at an agency, it would have taken at least a couple of weeks to build and cost the client probably in multiples of £10k. Old Spice Voicemail was built in hours and didn’t cost W+K or Old Spice (P&G) a penny.

2-) Usually, we as marketers worry about whether people are actually going to watch the ad you spent weeks producing, whether they’ll take part in your crowdsourced campaign and generally whether anyone will give a damn. To command a position where people are not just watching, sharing and engaging but people who don’t know each other are self-organising and willingly spending time, effort and money (domain, hosting) to produce what is essentially a channel for your brand? Stuff of dreams and legends. 

There are a lot of sound ideas around how to bring audiences and brands together online. Play down the role of the brand, provide incentives for users, think about how the brand can work for the audience rather than the other way round. But they’re all based on the idea that we have to convince people first.

Old Spice Voicemail tells us otherwise. Concentrate on connecting with people in ways that resonate with them. Rally the audience around an idea. Entertain and delight them. Just make awesome stuff. And the rest will follow.

Because when you manage to amass fans as passionate as this, anything becomes possible.

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