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For the past two days, Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, aka Isaiah Mustafa, has become the king of the social media space, charming the general public, bloggers and journalists with his gravelly baritone, spectacular abs and convoluted wordplay, delivering tailor-made video responses to TMYMCSL’s online fanbase. Creativity checked in with members of the Wieden + Kennedy, Portland team behind the massive project—Creative Director Jason Bagley, Digital Strategist Josh Millrod and Interactive Producer Ann-Marie Harbour—to find out how the agency achieved what’s shaping up to be the social media play of the year.

How did you come up with this idea for Isaiah to respond directly to Old Spice fans? 
Jason Bagley: It was a genius idea that came entirely from the mind of Iain Tait. Eric Baldwin, Iain and I were sitting around trying to think of how to capitalize on all the YouTube traffic we knew we’d be getting when the new Old Spice spots launched and Iain threw out the idea of having Isaiah Mustafa in a room for a few days making video responses to people’s YouTube comments. The only credit Baldwin and I can take is that he was looking at our faces when he said it. Also, our boss Mark Fitzloff said it was a great idea and would like that mentioned in this article.

What was involved in the prep on this shoot? Did you have any videos prepared ahead of time? How did Isaiah prep for this? 
Bagley: There was a ton of prep, and very little time to do it in. Once we had the idea and got our client’s support, it took the whole Old Spice team to figure it out and pull it off.

Our interactive producer Ann-Marie Harbour was amazing. She figured out the best format and how to pull off the production. The idea became bigger than just YouTube. We figured out how to extend it across Facebook, Twitter, blogs—everything. One of the critical things that helped us pull it off was a custom program Trent Johnson in our Interactive department created. It automatically uploaded people’s comments from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and everywhere else, and then allowed us to write responses to the comments and upload them directly to a teleprompter. The day before we launched the videos we made a few video responses so we would have some when we went live, but most of them were written and shot on the fly after we went live. Isaiah’s only preparation was being awesome, punching sharks and pumping mass loads of weights.

BY: ANN-CHRISTINE DIAZ