In July 2010, a guy on Twitter with almost no following asked Old Spice to help him propose to his girlfriend.
So Isaiah Mustafa sat down on the bathroom set, looked into the camera, and proposed for him.
She said yes.
That was at the bottom of the campaign's own Effie Awards filing, which is a strange place to keep a love story. Pages of objectives and Nielsen tables, and then near the end, a heading that reads "The Ultimate Metric." Underneath it, the engagement.
Somebody at Wieden+Kennedy decided the engagement was a result worth reporting to an awards jury.
Old Spice had introduced body wash for men in 2003, and by 2009 its share was slipping while Dial, Irish Spring and Nivea crowded in. Then Unilever announced a Super Bowl launch for Dove Men+Care, a brand with what Wieden+Kennedy called "legions of loyal female shoppers."
So Old Spice made an ad about a man on a horse and aimed it at women. By April 2010, Nielsen had Red Zone body wash unit sales up 60% year over year.
Exhibit A: three days of shooting to get one unbroken take, and he is on a horse (Old Spice / YouTube)
Most teardowns stop there, with the horse.
Five months later the team went back and asked what you do with a character everybody suddenly likes.
They put Mustafa back on the set and had him answer people.
Over two and a half days they wrote, shot and posted 186 personalized videos, some of them going from a stranger's post to a finished film in minutes. He gave lady-wooing advice to President Obama, flirted with Alyssa Milano, called a prairie wolf, and beat up a piñata.
Day one drew 5.9 million views, more than Obama's victory speech managed in its first 24 hours. By the second day Old Spice held 8 of the 11 most popular videos on the web; by the third it had cleared 20 million. Inside a month, Twitter followers were up 2,700%, Facebook fans went from 500,000 to 800,000, and the YouTube channel climbed from 65,000 subscribers to 150,000.
By the end of July, Nielsen had unit sales up 125% year over year. All-time high for the brand, and the number one men's body wash in the country.
They spent under $500,000 on media to do it.
Exhibit B: the same towel, the same set, now answering strangers (Old Spice / YouTube)
What's happening underneath it
Everybody in 2010 had the same YouTube. Anybody could have posted a video that week, for free, to the same audience.
What Old Spice had was a way of finding the one person worth answering.
No monitoring tool did what they needed, so the agency built one and named it NORAD, after the operation that watches the sky for incoming missiles. It pulled every mention of the brand off Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Digg and Reddit, then ranked them by influence and by creative potential and fed the winners to a teleprompter. The filing calls it the unsung hero of the campaign. That's fair; the machine is why 186 replies fit inside 60 hours.
Nearly 70% of those replies went to people the filing calls Average Joes. No audience, no leverage, nothing to trade back.
A brand sitting on the biggest hit in its category spent most of its rarest asset on people who couldn't pay it back.
Which is why the proposal made the awards submission. It's the cheapest thing in the whole campaign, and the only result with one person's name on it.
Sixteen years on, reach costs nothing and attention costs everything, so the scarce thing has moved somewhere else. Value of seen has gone down while the value of response has never been more important.
Verdict: 🟢 Steal it
Your NORAD, in fifteen minutes
Make a new doc. Create four headings: Replies. Comments. DMs. Mentions. Paste raw, no cleanup, no formatting, nothing deleted. Then paste the whole block below underneath the pile and run it in a project inside Claude or ChatGPT, both of which put projects on their free tier, so the list keeps building week over week and this costs you nothing extra.
Below is everything a human said to me or about me this week, pasted raw and out of order. Sort it. Do not answer it.
Rank the five people most worth a personal reply from me. Ignore follower counts, job titles and company names completely. Rank on three things instead: how specific they were about their own situation, whether a reply from me would actually change something for them, and whether they told me something I did not already know about my own work.
For each of the five, give me: their name and the one line of theirs that earned the slot; what they actually want in plain language, which may not be what they asked for; three talking points for a 40-second voice memo in my voice, as notes and not a script; and one question I should ask them back.
Then, separately, list anything in this pile that reads like a bug report on my product, my emails or my onboarding, even where the person was not complaining. Quote their words for each one.
Here is the pile: [INSERT YOUR DATA]
Bottom Line: Answer somebody by name today.
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Until next time,
—Payton ✌️
