Well Played

[We may have had our differences at one time or another, but that doesn't mean you're anything less than brilliant.]

WIEDEN + KENNEDY Sweet Smell of Success

A cross-platform campaign for Old Spice catapults the agency into the digital elite

By Eleftheria Parpis

Photos by Chris Mueller

Wieden + Kennedy was in a digital death spiral. The iconic creative shop behind Nike was blocked on how to adjust its psyche and personnel to embrace the digital shift transforming media and marketing.

It already had lost some Nike business when, in 2007, the agency’s founding client shifted its core running division due to Wieden’s lack of interactive depth. The shop needed to evolve quickly or die.

“We were not the swiftest picking up on the digital revolution,” says Dan Wieden, co-founder and global ecd. He told his staff, he says, that “whether we like it or not, the rest of the world has eclipsed us. If we don’t get our act together, we are going to be a footnote.”

Now, thanks to its breakout campaign for Old Spice’s Red Zone Body Wash—which broke with a Super Bowl weekend TV spot—Wieden is the agency your agency could smell like.

The work, a slightly twisted, tongue-in-cheek production starring a towel-wearing Isaiah Mustafa, was part of a concerted effort by the agency to strengthen its digital offerings. The results have landed the shop in its own version of Bizzarro World, a place where other marketers are looking to “The man your man could smell like” for ideas on how to run their own campaigns. The creative has garnered the brand a 2,700 percent increase in Twitter followers, 800 percent increase in Facebook fan page visits and a 300 percent increase in traffic to the Old Spice Web site. It’s also generated an estimated 140 million YouTube views.

According to Marc Pritchard, global marketing and brand-building officer of Old Spice at parent company Procter & Gamble, it has helped the brand lead market share and is “growing sales in double digits.”

Indeed, the Portland-Ore.-headquartered indie has had one of its best performing years in its 28-year history. It saw client growth in both Portland and New York, and increased its U.S. revenue and billings nearly 22 percent (billings to $1.5 billion, revenue $145 million).

For the most part, it mined existing client relationships. Chrysler added Jeep, Target gave Wieden lead agency status, P&G added a corporate branding assignment as well as Ivory North America, Nokia added North America, and Coca-Cola digital assignments for Diet Coke and Coca-Cola targeting teens.

The agency has also produced some of its best work for Nike, a client Wieden calls “the soul” of his agency. (Its running business returned to the shop in 2008.) “We were born in that cauldron of the early ’80s, when [Nike] wanted to be the Saturday Night Live of the Fortune 500,” he says.

Wieden’s best Nike work this year was the stop-motion spot “Human Chain” and its “Write the Future” commercial directed by Babel’s Alejandro G. Iñarritu. The latter spot, which starred more than a dozen pro-soccer stars and debuted on Facebook, was also in play during the World Cup as a digital installation on a Johannesburg skyscraper. It received so much positive buzz that World Cup sponsor and rival adidas ended up looking as battered as England after being drubbed by Germany.

The creatives that led the effort, Mark Bernath and Eric Quennoy, were promoted to ecds of the Amsterdam office, which had produced the work with assistance from Portland.

And this month, Wieden opened a new office in Sao Paulo, Brazil, headed by Icaro Doria, ecd, and Andre Gustavo Soares, managing director.

Improving the shop’s digital output took four years. To start on that path, in 2006 the agency hired Renny Gleeson, former managing director at Aegis Group’s Carat Fusion, as global director of digital strategies. He built up the shop’s digital production capabilities, adding digital creatives, developers, designers, coders—”folks who help iterate,” says Gleeson. He also worked on communications planning—what he describes as “changing the way the media team approaches what it does, how ideas evolve”—and community management.

“It’s not like we flipped the switch,” Gleeson adds. “It was a build. And we needed the spark to set it off. That’s where Iain comes in.”

Iain Tait, recruited last April from Poke London, which he co-founded, joined Wieden as global interactive ecd. Within months of his arrival, the Old Spice team let loose its “response” campaign. For three days in July, the agency created nearly 200 customized videos starring Mustafa that responded to mentions of the Old Spice TV spots on blogs and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. These videos spread virally and, in some cases, became ongoing two-way conversations, engaging participation from celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Ellen DeGeneres, not to mention a random consumer who wrote in seeking help from Mustafa in proposing to his girlfriend.

This social marketing component generated 1.8 billion PR impressions for the brand.

Even before the Old Spice response campaign, Wieden was being recognized for its new digital expertise at Cannes. It won the Cyber Grand Prix for its 2009 Nike “Chalkbot” campaign—a collaboration with Deeplocal for Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong charity—and the Integrated Grand Prix for the Livestrong campaign of which it was a part. (Wieden also won the top prize in film, and a Best Commercial Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its Old Spice work.)

With its global growth looking strong as well—it had a 10 percent jump in billings and revenue this year (billings to $2.3 billion, revenue $230 million)—the agency is especially optimistic about the future. Both Levi’s and P&G are expanding the agency’s duties with global assignments next year.

Wieden remains philosophical. “Brands are no different than people,” he says. “They lose their way and forget their way. You need to give them a jolt, hand them a mirror and put them on stage.”

YELLow Card

[always on the lookout, Ray]

Decode Cards

Who's side are you ON, anyway?

18 December 2010 Last updated at 16:29 ET
'Don't ask, don't tell' defenders were doomed to lose

By Iain Mackenzie BBC News, Washington
Activists rally for the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in Washington, DC, 10 December Supporters of repeal portrayed it as a 21st Century civil rights issue

There are still many Americans who do not want openly gay men and women serving in the military.

Some of them work in Congress. For the past year they have fought tooth-and-nail to keep the "don't ask, don't tell" that bars gay people in the armed forces from revealing their sexual orientation.

Defence spending bills have been filibustered off the floor simply because they contained provisions to repeal the law.

But it was a losing battle.
'Right thing to do'

Attitudes to homosexuality have changed since the controversial policy was introduced under President Bill Clinton 17 years ago.

Polls conducted within the military, and society at large, consistently show that people are far less troubled by the issue of sexuality than they once were.

For President Barack Obama it became a matter of credibility.

He promised during the 2008 election campaign to end "don't ask, don't tell", not just because it seemed to be in line with public sentiment, but because he believed it was the right thing to do.

Supporters of repeal portrayed it as a 21st Century civil-rights issue - on a par with earlier struggles by women and black Americans.

They pointed to about 13,000 military personnel dismissed under the policy since 1993.
Leeway for Pentagon

Their cause was bolstered when senior military figures joined the campaign - among them the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm Mike Mullen, and Gen David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama. Photo: December 2010 For President Obama, the vote should have a positive effect

With a few exceptions, the issue divided Congress along party lines.

Conservative Republicans were often portrayed as prejudiced and out-of-touch for their staunch opposition.

However, many genuinely believed that there were matters of national security and troop safety at stake.

They argued that change may well be inevitable, but introducing it in the midst of two wars - in Iraq and Afghanistan - was an unnecessary burden on the military.

Congress was almost left out of the debate altogether in October 2010 when a legal challenge in California temporarily overturned "don't ask, don't tell".

It was an appeal by the US government that reinstated it. At the time, President Obama said he would rather repeal came through Congress than the courts.

They finally got that on their third attempt at a Senate vote. A handful of moderate Republicans crossed the floor to support the bill.

The time scale for phasing out "don't ask, don't tell" is not immediately clear, however the Pentagon is likely to be given some leeway to implement the new policy.
'New wave'

For President Obama, the decision should have a positive effect.

Along with delivering health care reform, the scrapping of "don't ask, don't tell" is one of his most tangible achievements.

But having takenwhat he described as a "shellacking" in the mid-term elections, continuing to deliver "change" is only going to get tougher.

The current "lame-duck" session of Congress was the Democrats best chance to push through their pet legislation.

In January, a new wave of Republican Senators and Representatives will arrive in Washington and they are not coming to help the president.

Run away, Ye

Post-launch

[Still searching after 33 years]

13 December 2010 Last updated at 23:43 ET

Voyager near Solar System's edge

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco

Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, has reached a new milestone in its quest to leave the Solar System.


Now 17.4bn km (10.8bn miles) from home, the veteran probe has detected a distinct change in the flow of particles that surround it.

These particles, which emanate from the Sun, are no longer travelling outwards but are moving sideways.

It means Voyager must be very close to making the jump to interstellar space - the space between the stars.

Edward Stone, the Voyager project scientist, lauded the explorer and the fascinating science it continues to return 33 years after launch.

"When Voyager was launched, the space age itself was only 20 years old, so there was no basis to know that spacecraft could last so long," he told BBC News.

"We had no idea how far we would have to travel to get outside the Solar System. We now know that in roughly five years, we should be outside for the first time."

Dr Stone was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest gathering of Earth scientists in the world.



Voyager 1 was launched on 5 September 1977, and its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, on 20 August 1977.

The Nasa probes' initial goal was to survey the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, a task completed in 1989.



They were then despatched towards deep space, in the general direction of the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Sustained by their radioactive power packs, the probes' instruments continue to function well and return data to Earth, although the vast distance between them and Earth means a radio message now has a travel time of about 16 hours.

The newly reported observation comes from Voyager 1's Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument, which has been monitoring the velocity of the solar wind.

This stream of charged particles forms a bubble around our Solar System known as the heliosphere. The wind travels at "supersonic" speed until it crosses a shockwave called the termination shock.

At this point, the wind then slows dramatically and heats up in a region termed the heliosheath. Voyager has determined the velocity of the wind at its location has now slowed to zero.
Racing onwards

"We have gotten to the point where the wind from the Sun, which until now has always had an outward motion, is no longer moving outward; it is only moving sideways so that it can end up going down the tail of the heliosphere, which is a comet-shaped-like object," said Dr Stone, who is based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

This phenomenon is a consequence of the wind pushing up against the matter coming from other stars. The boundary between the two is the "official" edge of the Solar System - the heliopause. Once Voyager crosses over, it will be in interstellar space.

First hints that Voyager had encountered something new came in June. Several months of further data were required to confirm the observation.

"When I realized that we were getting solid zeroes, I was amazed," said Rob Decker, a Voyager Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument co-investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

"Here was Voyager, a spacecraft that has been a workhorse for 33 years, showing us something completely new again."

Voyager is racing on towards the heliopause at 17km/s. Dr Stone expects the cross-over to occur within the next few years.