You've got to laugh at this one: The most successful and talked-about commercial on today's TV is one that never officially ran on Australian TV. It has popped up on The Gruen Tranfer, Good News Week, even earnest and serious Q&A, and who knows how many more TV and radio talk shows.
It has been called "The perfect ad", has been ripped off and copied and parodied around the world. At the Cannes Lions awards it won the Grand Prix as "The world's best commercial". It's every marketer's dream - the ad that takes off like a rocket and captures the public's imagination.
I'm talking, of course, about the Old Spice "Look at me" commercial. No, not "Look at moi" as in Kath and Kim but "Look at me" as in Isaiah Mustafa. He's the handsome, muscular black footballer who challenges the ladies in his audience, "Look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me..." And makes a fairly safe bet that your man does not look anything like the Adonis on screen. However with a dab of body-wash he could smell like the bulging-bicepped Mustafa.
The guy is so sexy you can hear the sound of heaving bosoms all around, and the script so clever that you have to laugh rather than gag. Add to it a million bucks' worth of scenery effects that transfer our hero from bathroom to yacht to the back of a horse without a blink of his penetrating eyes.
From the marketing point of view it's the perfect way to transform the fortunes of an old-old product associated with your granddad rather than Gen X or Y.
But can one commercial change the fortunes of a product that has been gathering dust on the back shelves of an old barber's shop? We'll have to see. It's certainly having a huge immediate effect.
In the US, after a year of static sales the product shot up 107 per cent and swung its market share up five points. Mind you Gillette and Nivea body washes also made substantial growth. But I wonder if the commercial didn't just re-awaken interest in the category?
This is a great example of a marketer taking a risk with a clever commercial and hitting the jackpot. Remember last week's column - how research shows if they like the ad they're more likely to buy the product?
Apparently this ad has never had a paid-for run in this country, according to my friends at Mitchells. Yet world-wide it had 94 million views on YouTube including huge numbers of Australians.
They then stimulated this further. In response to Twitter messages, they selected over a hundred people and organisations and made an individual version of the commercial just for them. Of course most of the selected are famous folk or news media - who are bound to show their trophy around.
This follow-up was a marathon effort which was apparently turned out over two days. The copywriters and cameramen must have been working like a cattle auction. But handsome Isaiah seems to keep his sense of humour - and his cool - throughout.
Go to YouTube and search for "Old Spice man", and you'll find there's a whole industry of them . He even proposes marriage, on behalf of one Twitter, to another. And I believe it was accepted.
The problem now is how to maintain the momentum, and turn all this notoriety into ongoing sales. Staid old Procter & Gamble is as cobwebbed as their Old Spice product was, it's not a company renown for its creative marketing. Can those arthritic toes dance them forward from here? "Look at me, I'm P&G" doesn't quite ring true.
