Goodbye Old Spice Guy

Old Spice Guy retires from the phenomenally successful viral marketing campaign, just as things were at their hottest. Here is his farewell video. I will be sad to see him go, but I'm grateful that he departed so thoughtfully before setting off a global thermonuclear war and bacon shortage.

And he leaves us with an SEO memento: "silverfish hand catch" is now indelibly etched into Google.

These YouTube commenters said it best:

• [W. James Au]

  http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-youtube-procter-gamble-twitter-facebook-cmo-network-social-media-advertising.html

  Total sales for Old Spice body wash at supermarkets, drugstores and mass market retailers excluding Wal-Mart were up 16.7% in the 52-week period ending June 13, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market research firm.

• [Teapunk]

  I hope everybody involved in the campaign gets a truckload of awards.

• [Anonymous]

  >And he leaves us with an SEO memento: “silverfish hand catch” is now indelibly etched into Google.

  Only because they paid for it.

• [monstrinho_do_biscoito]

  as much as i love these ads. Old Spice is what my Grandad used and I don’t want to smell like Grandad.

• [Anonymous]

  CFO shoutouts aside, “silverfish hand catch” has yet to be indelibly etched into Google…I only came up with 207 results when running a Google search.

• [Sweet Zombie Jesus]

  Read the making of:

  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_internet.php

• [Bilsko]

  CFO shoutouts aside, “silverfish hand catch” has yet to be indelibly etched into Google…I only came up with 207 results when running a Google search (only 39 results with quotes!)

• [Sweet Zombie Jesus]

  And, this must be to his daughter:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvuYcbgZl-U

• [Anonymous]

  What? I have been in jail under a rock on another planet where there is no www. Who is this guy? I’m a lesbian but I’d drop and do him anytime. Latent and late: I am ashamed of myself. All hail this OS God.

• [Anonymous]

  Great campaign, but I’m still not going to buy diluted soap spiked with perfume.

• [petezombie]

  Even his YOUtube page smells great!

• [David Carroll]

  And now we await the inevitable awkward imitation starring The Michelin Man.

• [Anonymous]

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-qpEUOtLk8

  And this is to himselfa

• [esevoneg]

  I’m starting a campaign to elect the Old SPice Guy as the toughest man in the world. Down with the tyranny of Chuck Noriss!! For more see my blog at http://natescomicblogofunspeakablehorror.blogspot.com/2010/07/move-over-chuck-norris.html

• [sporkinum]

  I have no idea what this is. I pretty much block all advertisements on the web, and DVR almost everything on TV and skip the commercials. The only Old Spice guy I am aware of is Bruce Campbell.

• [hbobrien]

  “Total sales for Old Spice body wash at supermarkets, drugstores and mass market retailers excluding Wal-Mart were up 16.7% in the 52-week period ending June 13, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market research firm.”

  So, not Old Spice itself, but the body wash?

  Huh. So I guess they went from selling 6 units a year to selling — 7. Ooh. Aah.

  In all seriousness, though, one can’t compare the 60 million views to a percentage that doesn’t have the baseline.

• [Anonymous]

  New Spice can replace old spice.

  New Spice on “The Library”

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ArIj236UHs

• [Dave Faris]

  Please define “phenomenally successful,” and does this mean we have more of the same from them and their imitators?

  • [dculberson]

    Did you follow the link? Did you check out the video stats? I would count 20 millions views (for the two initial ads with Isaiah) as phenomenally successful, and that doesn’t count the follow up chatter over the next few weeks. It’s mystifying to me that anyone would need it defined when it’s clearly succeeded beyond even the hyperbole used.

    • [dculberson]

      Holy shit, I just noticed their total view: 61 million. That’s amazing.

    • [nerdler]

      Wouldn’t “phenomenally successful” be measured by how many people buy Old Spice? Who cares if 60 trillion people watched the ad if no one bought the product? I think that would have to be considered a phenomenal failure.

      • [straponego]

        Indeed. In fact, if sales of Old Spice do NOT spike tremendously in the wake of this phenomenally popular ad campaign, it would prove that advertising is a completely useless.

        But doubtless it will succeed; most people are, apparently, stupid enough to be positively influenced by ads. It’s certainly a funny campaign (though it should end nowish), but I don’t understand why that would make anybody buy Old Spice.

        • [NomadEngineer]

          I know a number of people are planning on buy Old Spice as a way of paying for the entertainment they provided.

• [seyo]

  I don’t get it.

• [Anonymous]

  There is a silver linning to this cloud!! Old Spice? http://www.youtube.com/acoreystory

• [Anonymous]

  “Silverfish” to me is a little, ancient bug that glides around and eats old books. It looks like it is from the age of dinosaurs.

• [Anonymous]

  i don’t think he’s leaving altogether, he’s just announcing an end to the personal video responses he’s been doing to twittererers over the past few days.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Ooh, he’s from Oxnard. No wonder he had to develop a good sense of humor.

• [Gunn]

  I hope he’s leaving for good. That would put the impermeable wax seal on my respect for Wieden+Kennedy. It’s a witty campaign and brevity is the soul, etc.

  It’s hard not to milk success, though, especially if the client is standing in the wings with a cashbox and an AK-47.

• [Anonymous]

  “Hey men, this guy is better than you in every way. Your girlfriend wants to have sex with him. You stink. Buy Old Spice.”

  That’s a pretty old technique. It was used so relentlessly against women that most went insane and started reading Vogue Magazine.