Have you ever heard of Isaiah Mustafa? He’s an actor. He played a bailiff on an episode of Ugly Betty back in 2008. Remember???
Wait, how about that cop that appeared in two episodes of Days of Our Lives in 2009? I thought that had daytime Emmy written all over it. I’m also lying.
If the name’s still not ringing any bells, maybe you’ll recognize him from some of his more recent work:
For the past year+, Mr. Mustafa has served as the face of Old Spice body wash in “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad campaign. If you’ve turned on a TV or browsed the Internet at any point in the past 12-18 months, chances are you’ve seen his face. You and millions of other people.
From a sheer exposure standpoint, the campaign in question has generated the kind of buzz that any brand would dream of. According to their agency, Weiden + Kennedy, the stats at the time the campaign dropped in 2010 roll off something like this:
Old Spice even became the #1 all-time most viewed branded channel on Youtube. Wow. Pretty much a full-on, eye-popping, strike-up-the-band success, right? Not quite.
Just one year later, Old Spice sales are down as much as 24%. Turns out that much of the sales increases originally attributed Mr. Mustafa’s abs had more to do with the buy-one-get-one-free coupons Old Spice was throwing out there, and less to do with his shirtless self. Go figure.
A few weeks back I wrote a post called “Going big isn’t always best”. In it, I talked about the propensity of some marketers to go for big ad campaigns that generate a ton of buzz, but do little for the bottom line of the brand in question. Same story here with Old Spice as it was with Burger King and its Subservient Chicken:
All branding aside, it doesn’t matter how many Twitter followers you attract or how many visitors come to your website. At the end of the day, if you aren’t increasing sales, it’s getting harder and harder to deem a campaign “successful”.