Did you hear that? Another explosion somewhere out on the interwebs has happened, and this one smells like Old Spice. Yesterday Old Spice launched, quite innocuously, a campaign that has now reached veritable meme status. Yesterday this message appeared quite innocently on the Old Spice Twitter feed:

“Today could be just like the other 364 days you log into twitter,” it read. “Or maybe the Old Spice man shows up.”

What happened next is internet viral gold. Immediately the Old Spice Man, Isaiah Mustafa, began fielding questions from Twitter, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, etc, the replies to which were short, pithy video responses created on the fly. The clincher was that of the 115 videos produced, many of them were responses to media, digital influencers and celebrities alike. Major news media, Twitter, the blogosphere, and your inbox are all a flurry with buzz about this campaign. It worked. They got us all talking (and maybe even buying).

It has long been a mantra of the web and digital advertising that “content is king.” Many of the accolades showered on this Old Spice campaign has been directed towards the content itself, and how engaging and awesome it is. How it is engaging influencers in real-time.

Now while the content itself is great– let us not underestimate the mechanism by which this great content could be surfaced, engaged with and cared about.

The success of this effort is predicated on good old fashioned Influencer Marketing. Human to human interaction. Talking. There isn’t just a creative content strategy at play here, there is a creative influencer outreach and conversation management strategy at play here. Word-of-mouth, engagement, influence. Too often these words get lost or diluted from constant punditry. But the reality is that this campaign worked because not only was great content created, but there was conscious focus and planning around fostering real-time, human dialogue through targeted outreach and community management. It is the dialogue which has now constructed a brand experience that the brand alone could never have created on its own. It highlights a new way of thinking about brand experience, pointing towards a need for live experiences and real-time marketing. The challenge of course, and the litmus for when it is done well, is that “real time marketing” shouldn’t look or act like marketing at all. Rather, it feels human, it feels participatory, it is driven by conversation.

Also, this is just brilliant….and true. This is the exact formula we use too: