Who remembers Old Spice?

Once upon a time, Old Spice was the smell of your dad. It was Carmina Burana and crashing waves. It was the gift you bought for a man when you’d long since run out of time and imagination and the bottle gathering dust in the bathroom cabinet. It was the sickeningly schmaltzy ad with the little girl who said she liked the smell of her daddy, the one that was wheeled out every Christmas long after it started growing mould.

Old Spice was, well, old. South Africans probably still think of that distinctive white bottle, and wonder whatever happened to the brand that, along with Blue Stratos, embodied the late 70s (hey, it embodied the late 70s for me).

Well, Old Spice is back — at least in the US — and it has changed. In fact, there’s talk that this may just be one of the best ad campaigns ever. Nobody in my line of work can afford to ignore it. If you haven’t seen it, take a look here.

The Old Spice man has become the symbol of Web 2.0. He first appeared earlier this year; clad in nothing but a white towel, his magnificent (but not intimidatingly magnificent) abs on display, he told women that he was “the man your man could smell like”. He also gave the world the immortal line: “Look at your man. Now back to me. Now back at your man, now back to me.”

So far, so good. Oregon based Wieden + Kennedy, the hot shot ad agency responsible for the campaign, had succeeded in repositioning a rather stodgy brand and picked up three Cannes Gold Lions along the way (and trust me, every agency wants Gold Lions in its awards cabinet). But more was to come. Last week, the brand went interactive in a way that has never been done before. People on various social networks were invited to pose questions to the Old Spice man, who then posted responses — more than 200 of them (!) — on YouTube. The logistics are mindboggling — in one day, they filmed 87 videos in 11 hours — but it paid off: the web is alive with Old Spice buzz.

Demi Moore, the Huffington Post, Perez Hilton — all the web’s biggest influencers were targeted. It could all have backfired horribly — the denizens of the net are not a forgiving bunch — but the critics are raving. “This is the future of marketing,” declared Mashable, one of the world’s biggest and most influential blogs. So it’s a pity that the popularity of the campaign hasn’t translated into increased sales.Some industry commentators have also asked whether this will be good for the brand in the long term.

Still, as a consumer whose associations with Old Spice have hardly been positive, I love this campaign. It makes brilliantly effective use of new, real time and highly responsive ways of communicating while getting the old-fashioned stuff right. The success of the Old Spice campaign is a reminder that no matter how immersed in the 24/7 connected world we become, certain fundamentals don’t change. We like things that entertain us, and if we’re going to be subjected to ads, we prefer them to be funny. We respond to good performances (casting in ads is so important) and we’re still looking for ways to connect emotionally with the commercial messages we see around us.

A lot of commentators have praised Procter & Gamble, the brand’s owner, for being brave enough to allow its agency to go ahead with creating ads unapproved. Anyone who works in the ad industry will know how rewarding it is to have a client who will let you take risks — and taking risks is going to become par for the course as the chaotic, noisy world of social media makes it harder and harder for companies to control how their brands are perceived.

The ultimate test of any ad campaign is whether it has a positive impact on the bottom line, and the jury is still out on this one. I’m holding thumbs that the Old Spice campaign will serve as an enduring example of how creativity makes business sense. Who would have thought that of all the brands that would change the way we think about advertising, it wasn’t Apple or Nike or Axe — it’s the stuff that used to smell like your dad?