Old Spice Refreshes Stock Photography With New Product

Old Spice ran a microsite recently asking “ARE _________________ NEWER THAN SHAVING GEL?” It only ran for a day, but now, if you view the site, you’ll learn that even the link you clicked to get there “Ain’t Newer Than New Old Spice Shave Gel.

When the site was live, you could fill in the blank with a noun and the microsite would pull up a related Getty image, and announce that your “noun” is not newer than Old Spice Shave Gel.

It’s an excellent refresh of “targeted” ads.

It might seem silly in its infancy, but this looks like the seeds of the future of advertising: customizable ads made relevant to every consumer. Imagine you are a local restaurant, and your online ad features a family of four celebrating a sports game, eating your food, and dad is wearing a sports cap. But what if because of a user’s Internet habits, it was deduced that they loved the Pittsburgh Steelers? Yep, the dad is now sporting apparel matching that consumer’s favorite team. That positive affinity is immediately associated with your restaurant.

Obviously, we aren’t there yet, but Old Spice is asking people to type in objects and then comparing their product to something that the user conjured up. That’s a brilliant mnemonic device.

Also, if you tried typing in something like “The Dark Ages” you were redirected to a brilliant url and shown an error message. Here is URL expanded:

I-Have-No-Idea-What-That-Is-And-It-Makes-My-Brain-Hurt-And-Want-To-Explode-But-It-Ain’t-Newer-Than-Old-Spice-Shave-Gel.

Old Spice does not miss an opportunity to communicate their brand values: quirky humor, unexpected fun, audacious superiority… From the way they took down a link for an old campaign, to the error message, they communicated it.

That’s the lesson of the day: Know your brand values. Of course, W+K (the agency of record) do what they’re doing as good as anyone out there. But it should give us all pause, because once we really know what our brand stands for, it becomes practically intuitive, WHERE, and HOW, to tote our virtues.