The Old Spice brand has been pretty much untouchable this year. Their latest marketing offering – ‘the man your man could smell like’ – has to be one of the best US ad campaigns of 2010. It all started back in February with an ad featuring the former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa (written about here in an earlier post by Guy Grimsley). Chiselled torso on show, Mustafa explained to “ladies” how if only “your man” used Old Spice they would smell, look, feel, become as perfect as Mustafa himself. 

It was an immediate cult sensation. Emmy-nominations soon followed. So too did a great little spin-off execution which saw the ad’s protagonist respond to questions posted on Twitter and Facebook with close to 200 different 30-second video clips. Today, 6 months down the line, you can even download personalised Old Spice answerphone messages. Needless to say, Isaiah Musatfa is Hollywood’s hottest new property.

It is exactly because of this success, because of the reverence with which Old Spice is held among its core target of early twenties blokes, that it is surprising to see the brand has had its fingers burnt over the last few weeks. The mini-uproar surrounds Old Spice’s involvement with another frat-pack American powerhouse brand: Madden. The American Football computer game is a national obsession, giving gamers ultimate control over tactics, training, transfers: in short, it’s the closest you’ll get to the real thing.  

Last month it was leaked that the latest version of Madden, to be released this summer, would include a new Old Spice sponsored feature giving every player a ‘Swagger’ rating. This rating will have little bearing on the actual game play, baring the fact that a player with high ‘Swagger’ is more likely to celebrate elaborately having scored a touchdown. The news was greeted with incredulity and anger by fans who protested that the new rating was pointless and simply added up to some bare-faced marketing opportunism from Old Spice.

The incident is a minor one, of course; the uproar will soon die down leaving Old Spice largely unscathed. What is fascinating, however, is the two marketing truths the episode has exposed, or rather reinforced. The first point, while obvious, is worth restating: don’t make the lazy assumption that just because another brand has the same broad target consumer as you it can be leveraged to reinforce your own offering. Slapping the Old Spice logo somewhere in a Madden game won’t inherently reinforce Old Spice’s standing among twenty-something ‘wanabe manly-men’. Secondly, and just as telling: consumers are savvy, all the savvier in a time when scepticism and disillusionment with big business is at record levels in America. Old Spice’s ‘Swagger’ gimmick bought with it no benefit. The ‘rating’ did not change game play. It just gave Old Spice an excuse to be seen in Madden. To consumers it was a con, a swizz, and has been exposed as such on the blogosphere.

Old Spice remains one of 2010’s marketing success stories. What this internet-driven saga has shown is even the hottest brands can get it wrong – if they show a little too much Swagger.

Following its pogo-powered wellies, Orange has concluded its sponsorship of Glastonbury with an attempt to create the most tagged photograph ever taken.

The photo of the crowd at the Pyramid Stage was taken at half-time during the England/Slovenia World Cup match, and is a massive 1.3 gigapixels in size. Created by Poke London, GlastoTag is made up of 36 separate snaps stitched together to create a panorama.

So far, Orange has amassed almost 8,000 tags – but with almost 70,000 faces in the picture, there’s still a lot of scope to play. With the ability to link tags to Facebook, the network provider has shown once again that it understands the power of social media.

It’s a lovely example of a brand tapping into the lasting goodwill generated by an event – and if you were there for the game, why not drop by the site and tag yourself? We will be…

When Gillette announced it had enlisted three heavyweights of the sporting world – Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry – to promote their new Champions campaign back in 2007, it was considered quite a coup. It appeared to be a safe strategy: to prove you are ”the best a man can get”, link yourself with sportsmen who are “the best a man can watch”. Events over the last couple of weeks, however, have highlighted the perilous nature of such sports endorsement.

First there was the ‘Hand of Gaul’ as it has come to be known – Thierry Henry’s cynical handball in the build up to the goal that put France through to the 2010 World Cup Finals at Ireland’s expense. The footballing outcry that followed soon translated into business fears for Gillette. In Ireland many people declared that, with Henry’s cheating invalidating his image as a suitable role model, they would boycott all Gillette products until he was dropped. It wasn’t long before photo-shopped joke ads like this were doing the rounds on office emails….

 With all these negative associations of Henry’s handball hurting their own brand, Gillette subtly tweaked some of their communications. As The Sun spotted, on the UK and international Gillette Champions website Henry is pictured next to Federer and Woods holding a football in his left hand. However the French version showed Henry without any football, simply standing with hands in pockets, thereby eliminating any obvious link to his cheating – a perceived point of embarrassment for France. While the move may well have been savvy marketing, it does make you wonder how Gillette will react to Tiger Woods recent mysterious car crash, where his wife used a golf club to smash the windows and drag the unconscious Woods to safety. After all, a golf club is trickier to hide than a football. Maybe they’ll replace it with it with some similarly shaped inoffensive item, like a French baguette.

What Gillette’s most recent debacle really does highlight is the uncertainties underlying any sports endorsement.  Struggling frozen food range GO3 have proved how not even endorsement from David Beckham will necessarily prove advantageous if the brand fit is wrong, while swimmer Michael Phelps’ drink driving and alleged drug taking show how squeaky clean appearances should be taken at face value. If a brand really is going to link itself with a breed of people as vain and unchained as famous sportsmen, they’d better be aware of the risks involved…