Do you want to smell like the fast growing viral campaign ever?

http://mashable.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-stats/

The Wieden+Kennedy campaign commonly known as "The Old Spice Man" is the fastest growing viral campaign...EVER (according to Visible Measures). In the first 24 hours alone, the videos on youtube got over 6 million responses, the highest in recent history, beating out competition such as the first black president's victory speech (little under 5million). Even Brit phenomenon Susan Boyl stands no competition at a mere 3 million responses in that time frame.

Marketers around the world as are asking themselves - WHY? How Old Spice capture the attention of millions of social networkers around the world, leading to a 107% increase in sales in a week (according to Mashable).

A friend of mine whom I worked with at SB Media Group was on the Old Spice account at W+K, and gave me an inside look at the creative behind the videos. Like most insanely viral youtube videos, no one had any idea beforehand of the how fast and far these videos would go, landing on celebrity news sites, buzzing through all the marketing community, and as previously mentioned, leading to an increase in sales.

There is certainly no formula for viral videos, anyone who says that they have it, is simply a "social media guru" (most overused untrue self-proclamation of 2009) and has really no idea what they are talking about. One can simply take their knowledge of videos that have gone viral in the past, do their best to emulate and throw it out into the ether, hoping it will catch. Scary, yes. Fail-proof, absolutely not. Can it be effective? As Old Spice has proven, the ROI can make it all worth it in the end, if successful.