Posted by Dianna Huff, July 17, 2010

In his post, “Apple’s Steve Jobs: He’s No Old Spice Guy,” Robert X. Cringely of InfoWorld talks about how Apple and Steve Jobs could use Old Spice pitchman – hottie Isaiah Mustafa to field questions about the iPhone antenna.

He then seques into the Old Spice social media campaign.

If you’ve been hunkered down analyzing Excel spreadsheets or off the grid in the last week, here’s the skinny: In a clever move, the Old Spice creative team, headed by P&G’s ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, responded to people’s Old Spice tweets via 20 – 60 second video spots, which you can find at the Old Spice YouTube channel.

The spots, featuring Mustafa wearing a towel and standing in a bathroom, are hilarious.

Cringely goes on to write:

Many ad firms have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to prove they “get it” and that they’re down with the Internet generation. Invariably, they fail miserably because they really don’t get it and they really aren’t down. Well, the Old Spice team got it — totally.

Whoever they hired to write these spots was completely in sync with the spontaneous nature of Internet humor. Their response to 4chan/Anonymous — Mustafa delivers a generic “thank you” while periodically holding random items in front of the camera — was brilliant, as was his final YouTube sign-off.

What this means: Prepare for an onslaught of imitators. In a few weeks we’re going to be hip deep in ad companies trying to outdo Old Spice in forced random/funky ways. I wish them luck. I don’t think it’s going to work.

You can find thousands of posts telling you how to do this or that: how to write direct mail copy; how to write content that goes viral; how to get thousands of Facebook fans or Twitter followers.

In the next couple of weeks, you’ll find just as many articles detailing how Wieden+Kennedy carried out the idea for its Old Spice campaign. In fact, this week FastCompany “opened up the ark” with the ad agency to discuss just how they were able to create over 100 spots a day.

Here’s the deal though: you can’t copycat your way to marketing success. (Trust me, I’ve figured this out for myself the hard way.)

The Old Spice social media campaign is a success because the team tried something that hadn’t been done before: they responded to people’s tweets via video.

But this campaign worked because it also had a number of other factors in place: women and men equally love Mustafa, who was already a known entity due to the quirky TV commercials that preceded the social media campaign.

Most important, the creative team understood social media — its strengths and its weaknesses — and used that knowledge to create a campaign that went viral instantly.

In short, they didn’t copycat what went before them. They used what was already in place as a jumping off point for an entirely new campaign.

This is the exact opposite of how many B2B companies approach marketing. “So-and-so company is doing this, we should too,” the thinking goes.

The end result is tired ads that use the same stock images and jargon-laded copy, Websites that look and sound the same, boring PowerPoint presentations, and ho-hum reports and white papers.

To achieve marketing success, you must be willing to take a few risks, analyze the marketing landscape (Wieden+Kennedy: “We didn’t want to respond to Tweets via Tweets as that’s been done already”), and be true to your company culture and mission.

Posting a video about making pancakes worked for Grasshopper, which offers virtual phone systems for small companies. It probably won’t work for you. Plus, it’s already been done.