The Most Interesting Man in the World

http://www.fastcompany.com/1674547/the-most-interesting-man-in-the-world-dos-equis

Why The Most Interesting Man in the World Moves More Units Than Old Spice Guy
Austin Carr
Mon Jul 26, 2010

The experienced actor behind Dos Equis' viral ad campaign on popularity, influence, and saving endangered Siberian tigers.

Consider for a moment the manly purr of Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa's "Hello, Ladies" salutation. It's seduced the country social media-style: 94 million views on YouTube, 630,0000 Facebook fans, and an estimated 1 billion aggregate impressions in just one week. But wait. It appears consumers may have been too distracted by his glorious swan dives and monocle smiles to remember the actual product he was hawking. Sales of Red Zone body wash have actually declined 7% according to a report by SymphonyIRI. (UPDATE: A spokesman for Old Spice claims Brandweek took SymphonyIRI's stat out of context. Citing Nielsen figures, the rep says OS body wash sales have actually increased 11% in the last 12 months.) And the towel-clad and deep-voiced Mustafa may have not even contributed to Old Spice's overall sales growth, which Ad Age chalks up to a high-value coupon campaign by the company. Both Nivea and Gillette saw similar if not higher growth during that period, and neither had the help of Mustafa--just coupons.

So did Mustafa's unprecedented popularity fail to translate into influence? Is there perhaps another equally viral ad campaign, one with a frontman who rivals Mustafa's dash and flair, that has helped move units?

Unfortunately for The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, there is: The Most Interesting Man in the World. Since he joined forces with Dos Equis in 2006, sales have shot up significantly every year, leaping 26% since January alone, Dos Equis brand manager Ryan V. Thompson recently told me. "We're now the fastest growing beer import in the country," he says.

Adding insult to injury, there's no question who would win a staring contest.

"The Most Interesting Man is well proven," explains Thompson. "He once went four days straight staring at himself in his own staring contest--he wins every time."

I decided to track down The Most Interesting Man in the World and speak with him about viral advertising for our chronicle of the social graph, The Influence Project. Why has The Most Interesting Man succeeded where Mustafa has failed?

"He's a man that has had life experience, and has been there, and done that, and beyond," says the also-pretty-damn interesting man who plays The Most Interesting Man in the World, Jonathan Goldsmith, deservedly in the third-person. "It's not just a slickness, but experience that means something."

According to Goldsmith, it is this infinite life experience that has given his character a depth, which is universally intriguing. "People ask me all the time for tips. How would you entertain? What advice would you have for meeting women? What does your home look like?" he says, pulling off the pitch-perfect hyperbole that only The World's Most Interesting Man could get away with. "If you're not interested, you will not be interesting. If you don't experience life, you won't be a participant--you'll just be a voyeur; you'll watch it go by like a parade you're not involved in."

Is there anything The Most Interesting Man in the World could learn, then, from The Man Your Man Could Smell Like? Would he ever try Old Spice Red Zone Body Wash After Hours?

"No, I don't think so," he says. "After tasting Old Spice, there are limitations [compared with Dos Equis]. I wish [Mustafa] well, and I thank him very much for following my training regime. He's looking very well as a physical specimen."

Breaking character for a moment, Goldsmith explains, "I think the campaign is so successful, because every man, including me, would like to be like him." He also credits the brilliant writers behind his clever lines and the company itself for keeping up the character. And this is a guy who knows characters. His credits read like a greatest hits collection of '70s and '80s television, with guest-starring roles in everything from Hawaii Five-O to Eight is Enough, CHiPs to Partners in Crime, St. Elsewhere to Trapper John M.D., Charlie's Angels to Highway to Heaven.... You get the picture. "Dos Equis is very wise to keep the mystique going," he says. "The Most Interesting Man is not just a talking head--he's not a conventional spokesman." Goldsmith even admitted that he was surprised Old Spice's campaign hadn't translated into sales.

There is one difference between him and the character he plays that he'd like to make clear, though. While The Most Interesting Man in the World uses his joie de vivre to sling beer, Goldsmith says he uses his celebrity now "to draw attention to [his] charities" which are of "vital importance" to him. He's heavily involved in several, including Free Arts for Abused Children, Stella Link (a socially conscious entertainment group), and the Sabre Foundation, an organization focused on saving endangered Siberian tigers. Seriously.

Old Spice Argues That Real Men Smell Good

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/business/media/16adco.html
Old Spice Argues That Real Men Smell Good
ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
July 15, 2010

WHEN Old Spice, the 72-year-old Procter & Gamble brand, was planning a new advertising campaign for shower gel earlier this year, it faced a challenge: its research suggested women purchase as much as 70 percent of the shower gel for men in their households, but using body wash struck some men as unmanly. How could they market body wash to female purchasers and yet still cast the product as decidedly masculine to lure men away from bar soap?

The answer, a campaign called “Smell like a man, man,” arrived in February with a television commercial starring the actor Isaiah Mustafa. “Hello, ladies,” says the strapping Mr. Mustafa, standing in a towel in a bathroom, as the spot begins. “Look at your man. Now back at me. Now back at your man. Now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me, but if he stopped using ladies’ scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s me.”

In the 30-second spot, by Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore., which relies on an ingeniously constructed set, the actor strolls from the bathroom to the deck of a boat and ultimately — before the camera pulls back for a final shot — Mr. Mustafa sits on a horse, proclaiming, “I’m on a horse.” The spot became an Internet sensation, drawing more than 13 million views on YouTube. (A video about how it was made, in a single shot using minimal digital effects, has itself had more than a million views.)

Now Mr. Mustafa, who the brand refers to as Old Spice Man, is back with a new commercial. He again begins, “Hello, ladies” and in one continuous shot manages to go from a dock, to rolling on a log, to walking on water, to strolling through a kitchen with a frosted cake, saying, “Do you want to be with a man who smells like he can bake you a gourmet cake in the dream kitchen he built for you with his own hands?” The spot attracted more than 6.2 million views since the brand uploaded it to YouTube on June 29.

To promote the campaign, on Tuesday and Wednesday the brand fielded questions to Old Spice Man through Twitter messages or on Facebook. Mr. Mustafa, meanwhile, stood wrapped in a towel in a bathroom set that had been constructed in a production studio near the agency in Portland, where four writers quickly scripted responses. Over two days, the brand uploaded about 185 videos, most about a minute long, to YouTube, including the actor responding to the actresses Alyssa Milano and Demi Moore and to George Stephanopoulos, the anchor of “Good Morning America,” where Mr. Mustafa subsequently was a guest on Thursday.

Perhaps the most surprising request came from Johannes S. Beals, who sent this Twitter message: “Can U Ask my girlfriend to marry me? Her name is Angela A. Hutt-Chamberlin.” In a video, Mr. Mustafa then held up a ring and asked her to make Mr. Beals “the happiest man in the world and marry him.” Less then four hours after sending the initial message over Twitter, Mr. Beals reported in another Twitter message, “SHE SAID YES!!!!”

In less than three days, the 65 response videos drew more than 5.2 million views on YouTube, where the Old Spice channel was the most viewed on Tuesday, while the brand’s Twitter followers grew to 48,000, from 3,000.
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The body wash campaign “touches on a very subtle but powerful sentiment that is bubbling under the surface of American culture now, and that is that it’s O.K. to be a man,” said Rob Frankel, author of “The Revenge of Brand X.” Mr. Frankel compared the spots to those from a competing men’s brand, Axe, which is known for over-the-top commercials in which men who use the products become suddenly irresistible to scantily clad women.

“Axe turns women into scent-sniffing bimbos and nymphomaniacs and is more about, ‘Use our product and it will enhance your sex appeal,’ ” said Mr. Frankel. “But Old Spice goes to your own character, and they’re really reaffirming masculinity.”

In a posting on the Web site Jezebel shortly after the first ad was introduced in February, Irin Carmon wrote about its appeal.

“Among the reasons the ‘I’m on a horse’ ad quickly became a viral sensation — a clever script, some surreal transitions, Mustafa’s magnetism — had to be the fact that women could enjoy it without feeling like we were participating in our own diminishment,” Ms. Carmon wrote.

Old Spice spent $7.5 million advertising body wash in 2009, well under the $30 million spent by Axe body wash, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. But in the first quarter of 2010 Old Spice advertised far more aggressively, spending $11.4 million to Axe’s $3.6 million.

Body wash sales, including women’s and unisex varieties, grew to $755 million in 2009, from $500 million in 2004, an increase of 51 percent, according to a 2009 report by Mintel, the market research firm.

“Guys have been a little slower to adopt body wash because early on they didn’t feel like it got them as clean as bar soap,” said James Moorhead, vice president of marketing at Old Spice, which introduced body wash in 2003.
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Some men told marketers they were reluctant to use the nylon webbing sponges called “poufs,” which raise a lather but were off-putting because of their dainty name and appearance. In 2009 Old Spice introduced a pouf in a rubber grip and called it a Deck Scrubber.

“An experienced seaman knows the gentler sex is unlikely to board a vessel whose deck, galley and undercarriage has not been scrubbed as clean as the shiny inside part of an oyster shell,” states the package. (Axe introduced its own manly pouf, called the Detailer, in 2008.)

“It took a little time for guys to get over the pouf,” Mr. Moorhead said.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 16, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.