One day last week I spent a good hour watching Old Spice’s youtube response videos. I was referred to the videos by first hearing about them, on a popular internet podcast called Diggnation. I just finished reading “Reality: Old Spice sales are actually up 107% in the last month” which at the moment is top on Hacker News.
As a tech savvy person, always looking for the “why” and the “how”. It was pretty astonishing seeing how many responses and the creativity that was involved in each response. While watching I had a revelation, these days marketing and especially commercials are not how they used to be. Most marketing tactics these days revolve around the same type of humor and irony that originated on the Internet.
Two other successful campaigns that use this tactic other than Old Spice is Stride Gum and Dos Equis (probably the best commercial ever). This humor can’t be faked, believe it or not it needs to be really well thought out. What I’m suggesting is a new field of study and career choice. In the future all businesses and brands will need to not only sell a product but craft a carefully illustrated campaign designed to resonate with today’s internet culture. I call these select individuals “contemporary internet humor specialists”. This is something we seldom think about, I mean there are people who actually write and approve all the humor we see in these campaigns. Are these people hard to come by? Can big business just hire some 18 year old kid off the street to come up with a product campaign that will increase sales by 50 or 100 percent?
I think that social media is one thing, but leveraging your brand to be hip and with-it is another. With the success of Old Spice I see many companies trying and failing at the “internet humor” game, because they hire people that don’t know what there doing. One thing that all of these companies have in common is that they all have youtube accounts and people actually want to spread the commercials around, unlike brand x with brand x’s uninteresting commercial. Big business has figured it out, comedy equals viral and viral equals sales.
The idea of fake or commissioned humor is happening right now, these commercials are sneaking right into our memes and culture. The difference is with these “commissioned” memes and internet memes is that someone is profiting on the virus they unleash to the world, and unlike internet memes there is a person (“contemporary internet humor specialists”) hired to construct the campaign (an author).
