You know you’ve got a viral marketing hit on your hands when the CFO of Google mentions it in an earnings call. Yes, I am talking about the Old Spice YouTube Tweetathon where the bare-chested Old Spice Man addresses people on Twitter via personalized commercials on YouTube .
At the tail-end of a long, very long, 90-minute earnings call in which I dozed off at least three times, Google CFO Patrick Pichette perked me up when he made a reference to the Old Spice social media marketing campaign. “It just gives you a glimpse of where the world is going,” he said with a touch of awe in his voice.
That begs the question, one day will all ads be made like this? The Old Spice Man has already answered this, it turns out, and he warns of the cataclysmic effects which might result if he were to do ads for all the world’s products.