Most comments in the Youtube channel argue whether it’s true or fake … no one said anything about Gillette, nor the video really ties into the brand on any way …

Best comment was: “I was pretty sure it was a fake but I analysed it on FC Pro. If you go frame by frame you can clearly see the faint yellow trail of the ball which in the end hits the bottle on the guys head. First I thought he hit the ball wide, left of the guy but you also can see that there are people standing, which made me wanna check it. So I’m very positive that it’s the real thing.”

Really nicely done. btw, Federer is a beast and I really hope he wins the US open again.

Everything we do, we do with a mindset of digital amplification through space and time … and Facebook places is just, exactly, that. This can really be huge.

Why to Check In? by Facebook.

This is a smart move on Coke’s end. Everyone knows that Coke mainly targets teens, and what if instead of marketing to teens, you get teens come to you, promote you, share, chat, and advocate your brand? Dream came true …

Coke organized this experimental amazing hangout villa they called The Coca Cola Village. They’ve been doing it for a few years, or at least I found videos from 2008 and 2009.

This year’s was a little different though, an Israeli agency called E-dologic — part of Publicis, extended the event in effort to bring the Facebook “Like” to the real world. Not only they invited thousands of teens who talk about this through traditional word-of-mouth, but they used the Facebook Presence-like concept where they distribute teens a wristband, they link it to their Facebook account, and the village automatically digitalize, archive, organize, and share their experience. It makes it easy to re-live the fun, read the comments, see their friends, share activities, and for Coke? instant-massive-ultra-influencing system that leverages teens to promote Coke’s brand among their circles.

Really nicely done. As expected, Facebook will keep penetrating the real-world. Next efforts will probably use the open graph to describe more precise locations and describe relationships among people, places, and objects.

Microsoft has the same ability to display street view from person PoV filmed with 360 degree cameras, just like what we use with Google Street View every day … but they built this project to dynamically mash the photos to build an infinite panorama perspective …

For further details, including Microsoft’s research paper and more films, visit their site, here.

Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable
users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive
360panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to
bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense
of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective
“strip” panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but
lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.

We present Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the
immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multi-perspective
strip panoramas. We demonstrate a seamless transition
between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas. We also
present a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes
many of the limitations of previous systems. As the user slides sideways,
the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered
dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective
view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the
immersion. We call this form of sliding sideways while looking at
a street facade a street slide. Finally we integrate annotations and a
mini-map within the user interface to provide geographic information
as well additional affordances for navigation. We demonstrate
our Street Slide system on a series of intersecting streets in an urban
setting. We report the results of a user study, which shows that
visual searching is greatly enhanced with the Street Slide interface
over existing systems from Google and Bing.

Previously, the only other Geico commercial to pass the million mark was the 2006 Caveman at the airport, which only has 1.2mm views.

With all the great content Geico has, it goes to show you how important is a good understanding of the digital space.

And for your pleasure, here’s the latest Geico spot released at the same time as Piggy … Here’s Geico’s Octopus.

So Geico switched their ads now to weird cheese looking animal commercials… a Piggy, an Octopus, and there’s another Bird one not even worth showing. It’s really weird to watch these spots after the great legacy they left behind with the Gecko, Caveman, or even that short-lived failure money stack campaign …

Second spot takes a spin on the old butterface and introduces the concept of buttershoes.

• Old Spice accounted for 75 percent of conversations in the category in the first three months of 2010.

• Half the conversations came from women.

• The YouTube/Twitter social media response campaign was “the fastest-growing and most popular interactive campaign in history.”

• More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech. (Which most of us can agree is kinda sad.)

• Total video views reached 40 million in a week.

• Campaign impressions: 1.4 billion.

• Since the campaign launched, Old Spice Bodywash sales are up 27 percent; in the last three months up. 55 percent; and in the last month up 107 percent.

NOTE: These stats are for the entire campaign, mostly TV and traditional. The sales numbers were taken from June, before the social media component even launched. Impressive nonetheless. For unofficial social media specific stats please refer to my previous post.

Enjoy!

Shanghai Apple Store from Freddie Laker on Vimeo.

Inevitably and as expected, the videos got views, but following rapidly increased across all channels.

According to Visible Measures, “Old Spice Responses” — a.k.a the string of custom-made vids — is one of the fastest-growing online video campaigns of all time. The company compares the endeavor to some of the most popular viral videos to date below, and how they’ve grown over the course of 24 hours (to be fair, “Old Spice Responses” had a time limit attached, so there was more urgency to participate with this particular string of videos than there was to get in on, say, the Susan Boyle craze).

Now let’s compare the numbers to Friday’s post.

The Return of The Man Your Man Could Smell Like kept getting hits and grew from 3MM views to 6.4MM views, and from 21k likes to 33k likes. This video was autoplayed in the Youtube.com/OldSprice channel — destination where people were going to explore all the new videos being posts, over 180 videos in two days.

Some numbers:

• Total videos uploaded: 183
  • 12 July, 2010: 29 videos uploaded
  • 13 July, 2010: 89 videos uploaded
  • 14 July, 2010: 65 videos uploaded
• Combined viewing figures: 10,954,096
• Most watched video: 698,205 views

15 Most Popular Videos

What’s even more impressive, is that Old Spice has by far the most popular channel, and 8 out of the top 15 videos!

YouTube’s top Channels this week. OldSpice shows 13,500,000 views, almost tripling the 2nd best.

Top videos for today (July 16, 2010, just updated the post to add this): Old Spice with the number 1, 2, 4, and a total of 8 out of the top 15 … now that’s impressive.

Now let’s look at Facebook:

Old Spice Facebook fans increased from 563k to 592k, so about a 29k bump since the launch of the social campaign.

Referring Site	Click(s)
www.youtube.com	9,585
www.oldspice.com	968
Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct	537
www.swaggerizeme.com	2
3.hidemyass.com	1
bit.ly	1
oldspicemobile.com	1
translate.googleusercontent.com	1
www.facebook.com	1
www.oldspice.com	1

Bit.ly link tracking from the YouTube channel header tracked 10k Facebook referrals from YouTube, compare to 1k last week.

Old Spice Twitter followers increased from 8k to 66k in 2 days.

Conclusion:

So, 58k new Twitter followers, 29k new Facebook fans, 6.4MM views of the campaign video + 5MM views of all responses in 48h.

Amazing campaign by W+K, simplicity = power. They carefully chose social influences that will promote their personalized viral video, and the true power was speed, amazing copywriting, and a great actor… hats off, I was truly impressed.

[Updated 07/16]: Added Youtube’s top channels and videos.