Published July 16, 2010
Nieman Journalism Lab editor Megan Garber says we newsies can learn a lot from the Old Spice man (@OldSpice) — the ridiculously handsome spokesmodel whose charm caused even the most cynical anti-meme bloggers to perspire.
If you somehow missed it, the Old Spice ad agency holed up in a studio for hours and recorded short, personalized video clips in response to what was being said on the Web in real time. Even NPR got the love.
And the best part — he cut it off before people could tire of it. In his good-bye video, Old Spice man seemed to be talking directly to all of us:
I know a lot of you have written me and commented on my works, but I am just one ridiculously handsome man. I can’t write to everyone. But please know that I consider you my dearest and closest Internet friends. I’ll never forget this time we spent together.
Garber says the videos are an assault on the mass media’s broadcast sensibilities (emphasis hers):
There’s the obvious, of course: the fact that the ads are personalized. That their content is created for, and curated from, the conversational tumult of the web — “audience engagement,” personified. … The real hook of the videos isn’t the OSM’s awesomely burly baritone, or the whimsy of his monologues (the scepter! the bubbles! the fish!), or the postfeminist irony of his Rugged Manliness, or any of that. It’s the fact that we’re seeing all those things play out dynamically, serially, in (semi-)real-time. And: in video.
We don’t always have to craft beautiful, highly produced media to engage our audience. We just have to go where they are.