Think you have nothing in common with the Witcher? Sure, he’s got spells and ghouls and all that. But you know what else he has? Body odor.
Enter: The Netflix-Old Spice collab the world didn’t know to ask for.
If you haven’t watched it yet, “The Witcher” is a fantasy-drama Netflix series based on Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books. The show is set on a fictional, medieval-inspired landmass known as the Continent.
To promote the second season of the streamer’s dark fantasy series “The Witcher,” Old Spice and Netflix partnered on a line of deodorants and an ad campaign titled “Ode to Smell.”
“No One Can Run, No One Can Hide, from the Perils of B.O.”
Imagine living in medieval times when people only bathed once a month or less: NO, thank you. This smelly thought was the inspiration behind the “Ode to Smell” campaign. The ad features Season 1 actor David Broughton Davies, who, in the ad, plays a councilman leading a tavern full of peasants in a shanty-like song about how a curse has befallen everyone. Now, everything smells horribly bad, making people throw up, mice run and hide, and horses drop their jaws from the nastiness.
Sure, the ad was great, but this collab definitely wasn’t only about that. The other important part is the physical product: six limited-edition scents inspired by the characters and locations of “The Witcher” world: three pleasant ones – Smell of Surprise, Yennefer’s Underarm and Blaviken Butchering – and three stinky ones – Roach, Geralt’s Bathwater and Kikimora Corpse.
To save you the hassle of imagining how these deodorants smell, here’s how Old Spice described them:
- Blaviken Butchering: “The reek of a market hits thy nose, spices and fruits ere they decompose, Oh the, scent of Blaviken sweet as angel’s breath, before the butcher came and it smelled like death.”
- Yennefer’s Underarm: “Flowers and fruits is how Yennefer smells, but why bother bathing when you can cast a spell, one whiff of her odor and you’re enthralled by her charms. Now imagine that power in the pits of your arms.”
- Smell of Surprise: “This scent is thine, but thou cannot yet know, will it be friend or will it be foe? No elder could tell you no matter how wise, that’s why it’s called the smell of surprise.”
- Roach: “The behind of Geralt’s faithful steed, makes an almighty reek indeed. The more they adventure the more his love grows, yet her rump tortures even his nose.”
- Geralt’s Bathwater: “This, scent is made from Geralt’s bath water. As pungent as week old battle slaughter, a soup of dirt and grime and blood, conveniently in a stick form.”
- Kikimora Corpse: “The carcass of a kikimora rots very slowly, the gases it emits are rather unholy, a stench that would make a thousand knights sick, taken from a swamp, taken from a swamp and turned into this stick.”
“Smelly Bard Bot”
For the new line, Old Spice created a custom-made chatbot on Reddit, R/SmellyBardBot, emulating “The Witcher” comic-relief character Jaskier, a traveling bard. This, according to Old Spice, is the first time a consumer-packaged brand (CPG) has a custom-promoted chatbot on the platform.
An AI Randomizer helps the bot interact with users. While it’s a limited edition, fans who miss out on the deodorants can still receive one of 1,000 “rub & sniff” trading cards, adding a collectibles aspect to the push.
And to make the Old Spice x “The Witcher” tie-in more fun, scents like Yennefer’s Underarm are available for fans to win through a trivia contest at OldSpice.com/Witcher.
Making sure the Witcher fans wouldn’t miss the ads, the campaign raises the level with hidden Witcher references and a first-ever look at the new Little Horse character in Season 3. This collab also caught the attention of social media influencers who showed up on their platforms and showed their followers what Yennefer’s Underarm Or Geralt’s Bathwater would smell like.
A Content Collab with a Witcher scent
A good collaboration always comes with financial gains. However, what is as important (or even more important) is the reach the campaign gets and how far the brand understands the new audience it’s interacting with.
Old Spice also put a significant effort in terms of audience engagement, reaching the fanbase through creating a custom-promoted chatbot on Reddit, then using an AI Randomizer to help interact with users. Meanwhile, Netflix, which does not run ads, benefits from brand partnerships like this since it shares its content with a broader audience.
When Old Spice launched these limited edition scents with Netflix, it used content collaboration to reach a new audience, not only “The Witcher” fans but also the Netflix audience in general, along with social media influencers as a part of content marketing. All surely helped push brand awareness forward and reach new millennials and Gen Z audiences.
This article was syndicated by MediaFeed.us.
More from MediaFeed:
4 Content Marketing Campaigns that Went Viral
You’re not you when you’re hungry! Well, maybe you are, but I’m sure you’ve heard this countless times.
This tagline is a core memory for many people. But why do some of the ads we receive daily go viral and some don’t? It’s all in the way some companies build their content marketing strategies. Instead of spamming customers, they create an experience that puts them at the heart of the brand’s messaging.
Let’s go through some of the most famous marketing campaigns.
Coca cola by (CC BY-SA)
In 2009, Snickers realized its brand needed to leave a bigger impact on potential customers, a reason for them to choose it as a snack. To do that, Snickers partnered with BBDO to create a new marketing strategy. This campaign centered around hunger-induced mood swings.
This theme was brought to life through a series of commercials showing people transforming into bizarre caricatures of themselves when they fail to satisfy their hunger. The value this campaign proposes is establishing that Snickers can solve that problem and help you become yourself again.
The ads focus on customers and their needs by using humor to address a simple aspect that can talk to everyone, especially teenagers. Prior to this campaign, Snickers’ target audience was mainly young males. This was e a huge shift from that narrow target to a broader market. Additionally, marketing efforts have been kept fresh with limited edition flavors and seasonal promotions.
Snickers
During the early 2000s, Old Spice held a fair position in the US market for men’s hygiene products. However, it was seen as unfashionable and was largely depending on Procter & Gamble aging reputation.
In 2006, Wieden+Kennedy replaced Saatchi & Saatchi as the brand’s advertising agency. After a long time of being associated with a more traditional image, W&K decided to add the humor component into the brand’s messaging, using every stereotype of masculinity. By provoking men to purchase what would make them smell like a man,the campaign “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was created.
Sales of Old Spice body wash, which were already on the rise, rose by 55% over the three months following the first TV commercial. After that, P&G made another clever step: its marketers used Twitter’s promoted trend ad platform to ask Old Spice followers to submit questions for the Old Spice Man on Twitter and Facebook, as well as on Reddit and Digg. People voted for their favorite questions, and the winners received personal replies from Isaiah Mustafa, the manon the ad. The interaction they got was considered a huge social media win.
But then things took a turn: After its major spike in sales when the campaign was launched, communication with the audience dropped, which was a real mistake. P&G didn’t use what it had properly; instead of keeping the engagement with the followers on a more personal level, they faded from the scene and stopped interacting with their followers.
Old Spice
While Old Spice didn’t take its communication with its followers seriously, Coca-Cola knew that communication is the most effective way to maintain its position in a market saturated with choices, especially among younger consumers.
In the early 2010s, The “Share a Coke” campaign replaced the traditional Coca-Cola logo with common names, encouraging consumers to find and share a Coke with friends, family, and even strangers.
The campaign was widely spread on social media. prompting consumers to share images of their personalized Coke bottles on platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, using #ShareACoke hashtag, which fostered a sense of community around the brand.
One of the strong points “Share a Coke” campaign had was its adaptability to diverse markets. Coca-Cola replaced logos with culturally relevant names, showcasing an understanding of local possible and current audiences. According to Coca-Cola, over 80 countries participated, resulting in more than a billion personalized bottles sold. I still have one my friends gave me with my name on it.
Yet the “Share a Coke” campaign also had its share of challenges. The process of producing personalized bottles on a massive scale presented significant obstacles in its production process to accommodate the number of names and variations and overcome distribution and stock management challenges. And, of course, even then not everyone’s name made it on the bottle of a Coke.
Coca cola
“Twist, Lick, Dunk.” For 33 years now, this has been Oreo’s tagline to show the best way to eat its Oreo cookies. After all this time, Oreo was still able to show that the brand still owns its position in the marketplace.
Oreo played it simple but clever with a tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl.Amid an intense third quarter between American football teams, a power outage at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans left the stadium in darkness for about 30 minutes leaving, TV viewers confused as to why the football coverage was suddenly cut off.
Oreo acted fast and smart, posting a simple tweet on its Twitter account. The post showed a dimly lit Oreo cookie with the words “You can still dunk in the dark.”
The day after it was posted on Twitter, the tweet gained around 15,000 retweets while the Facebook post recorded approximately 20,000 likes. The “Dunk in The Dark” image also garnered $525 million-worth of earned media impressions. The Huffington Post even said that “one of the most buzz-worthy ads of the 2013 Super Bowl…wasn’t even a commercial―it was a mere tweet from Oreo during the blackout.”
Oreo
Launching a marketing campaign should never be your goal finding ways to use the campaign to create a rich communication with the audience is a main key that marketing strategies should consider.
With so many ads being shared every second, marketers and advertisers need to spice things up by looking beyond the traditional ways of advertising. Speaking to the customers’ experiences and using their ways of communication to reach them are key for brands to have campaigns that not only make an impact but also stick in their target audiences’ minds.
This article was syndicated by MediaFeed.us
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Featured Image Credit: Old Spice.
