Old Spice videos viewed 11 million times

15 Jul 2010

jordan.stone

It had to end at some point…

After the third day of activity, Isaiah Mustafa and Old Spice have bid farewell to their ‘Internet friends’ and recorded their final YouTube video. Much has been written about the campaign over the last few days (see our case study with links here), and the buzz on blogs and Twitter have been explosive.

Here at We Are Social, we were a bit curious as to what the viewing figures looked like so we had a closer look at the Old Spice YouTube Channel. This is what we found:

• Total videos uploaded: 183
  • 12 July, 2010: 29 videos uploaded
  • 13 July, 2010: 89 videos uploaded
  • 14 July, 2010: 65 videos uploaded
• Combined viewing figures: 10,954,096
• Average video view (mean value): 59,858 views
• Median value: 40,536 views (Re: Idgit | Old Spice)
• Most watched video: 511,694 views (Re: Perez Hilton | Old Spice)

15 Most Popular Videos

YouTube viewing figures are based on data collection ending 14:00 BST (09:00 EDT, 06:00 PDT) 15th July 2010
View raw data here

Among these popular videos, celebrities and key online figures standout like Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Kevin Rose. The video directed at ‘Anonymous’ deserves a special mention:

According to ReadWriteWeb:

How loved has the new campaign proven to be? 4Chan, the anonymous nihilist obscene messageboard from whence sprang memes like LOLCats and RickRolling, was the subject of [Anonymous]… 4channers hate everything, especially people who talk about 4chan – which this savvy man in a towel did not do.

And now it occupies the second most watched spot, which is no small feat.

This covers off on the publicly available viewing figures (which have surely grown during the time of writing this), but there is surely so much more that can be learned from how the online audience behaved with this campaign and from the viewing behaviour on YouTube. Things like:

• Comments – Which videos were the most discussed/engaging? Was there any discussion of purchase preference or the Old Spice product in these comments, and how can this be fed back into product marketing and development?
• Demographics – Which audience(s) did this campaign appeal to the most? What is the age/gender make up, and the geographic spread of viewers? How does this compare with Old Spice’s target customer?
• Sharing data – How did the Old Spice videos make their way across the web? How did videos reach secondary and tertiary audiences? What were the most important platforms in driving this reach (Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Reddit vs. Digg vs. blogs)?
• Embed data – Who and what were the most popular / influential sources to embed the videos? What was the ratio of views on YouTube, compared to views of videos embedded elsewhere?

The opportunities for measurement are almost endless, and Wieden + Kennedy / Proctor & Gamble are sitting on some very interesting data behind the YouTube account login. We definitely hope to learn more over the coming months.

Time above shown in BST, which is 5 hours ahead of EDT, and 8 hours ahead of PDT

Meanwhile Twitter over the last few days has been busy:

Twitter data collection ended 13:30 BST (08:30 EDT, 05:30 PDT) 15th July 2010, query: “Old Spice” OR oldspice

Since 13 July 2010 there’s been about 175K Old Spice related tweets, and they were broken down as follows:

26% were retweets, which indicates how readily people passed around the content online. Meanwhile 8% were @replies, and the overwhelming majority of those were directed at @oldspice, showing that people were quite keen to get involved (even me). The remaining ‘regular tweets’ were, by and large, people commenting about the ‘old spice guy’/’old spice man’ videos as they watched, and shared the YouTube links. A cursory read of these Tweets were found to be extremely positive, which probably comes as no surprise. A word cloud, drawn from a sample of 10,000 Tweets from 13 July – 15 July tends to support this:

The words “Old Spice” and “@oldspice” were removed from the word cloud for clarity.

It’s worth noting that words like hilarious, like, love and awesome are among the 50 most prominent words of the 157,849 rendered in the word cloud.

So what now? It appears that Wieden + Kennedy and Old Spice have created a bit of a monster, but have phased out activity while it was still fresh and universally liked. I imagine the video viewcount will continue to climb as people make their way through all 183 videos, and the Twitter buzz will likely calm down. I expect attitudes towards the brand will remain positive, though it will be really interesting to see if this translates directly into sales.

As succesful as this campaign has been however, I can’t say that I envy the people behind it… I mean, how do they top that? Naturally, we’re hoping they (or perhaps even, we) do!