What a Small Business Can Learn From the Old Spice Campaign

Bizer · 2026-10-01

The famous ad is not the part to copy. The replies are. In July 2010 the Old Spice team filmed and posted 186 short, personal videos answering people who had written to them online, over about two days. A small business cannot afford the ad. It can absolutely afford to answer people by name, quickly, in its own voice.

What actually happened?

The facts, from the campaign's public record:

• February 2010. Old Spice, a Procter and Gamble brand, released a 30-second commercial called "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like", made by the agency Wieden+Kennedy and starring former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa. It went online on 4 February and on US television on 8 February, in the days after Super Bowl XLIV.
• The audience was women. The ad spoke straight to them, on the reasoning that women often buy body wash for the men in their household.
• June 2010. The ad won the Grand Prix for film at the Cannes Lions festival. Later that year it also won a Primetime Emmy for outstanding commercial.
• July 2010: the Response campaign. Over about two days, a small team on a bathroom set in Portland wrote, shot and uploaded 186 personalized video replies to comments and questions from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and elsewhere. Some went to celebrities. Many went to ordinary people.

You will see sales figures quoted for this campaign, some of them dramatic. They come from different sources measuring different periods and products, and we have not been able to pin one down cleanly enough to repeat it. The lessons below do not depend on any of them.

Lesson 1: Know who buys, not just who uses

Old Spice sold a men's product by talking to the person who often makes the purchase. Many small businesses have the same split and never notice it.

A pediatric dentist's customer is a parent. A senior home-care service is usually chosen by an adult child, often from out of state. A lawn service may be hired by the spouse who hates mowing. Write your next ad, your website headline, your Facebook post to the person holding the card. Ask your last ten customers who decided, and you will probably learn something.

Lesson 2: One idea, said with confidence

The ad has one joke and commits to it completely. It does not list features. Most small business advertising does the opposite and crams in every service, the phone number twice and a coupon.

Pick the one thing you want people to remember. "We answer the phone at 2 a.m." is a business. A list of eleven services is a directory entry.

Lesson 3: Reply to people, personally, fast

This is the part that transfers best, and it is the most underused advantage a small business has. Old Spice needed a studio, writers and a famous actor to make replies feel personal. You only need to be a real person.

• Answer every review, by name, mentioning what they actually said.
• Reply to comments the same day.
• When a customer tags you, thank them in a way that proves you read it.
• Record a fifteen-second phone video thanking a regular. It costs nothing and they will show it to people.

The Response campaign worked partly because speed made it feel live. A reply three days later is customer service. A reply in an hour is a conversation.

Lesson 4: Have a voice, and keep it

The replies sounded like the ad. Same character, same rhythm. That consistency is why people could tell it was really the brand talking.

A small business voice does not need to be funny. It needs to be recognizably you. If the owner of a Houma tackle shop writes posts the way he talks at the counter, customers know who is speaking. That is worth more than polish.

What does this cost, and what can go wrong?

The money cost is close to zero. The time cost is real: replying personally to everyone takes an hour or more a day once you have any following. Old Spice did it for two days with a full team. You are signing up to do it indefinitely, alone.

Humor carries risk. A joke that lands for one audience annoys another, and a small business cannot absorb a backlash the way Procter and Gamble can. Our position: be warm before you try to be funny. Warmth rarely backfires.

Attention also fades. The campaign was a burst. If a post of yours takes off, the following week will feel like a crash. Plan for the steady habit, not the spike.

What is uncertain

How much the campaign moved sales over the long run is debated, and we would not quote a number we cannot trace. Platforms have also changed. Reddit, Twitter and Digg in 2010 rewarded novelty in ways that 2026 feeds may not. What has not changed is that people notice when a business answers them like a person. For how to put that into a routine, see how to run a Facebook page in five minutes a day.