Unless you were living under a rock, you probably saw at least one of the Old Spice commercials starring Isaiah Mustafa that began airing the day after the 2010 Super Bowl. With this campaign, Procter & Gamble, Old Spice’s parent company, showed the world how a brand can play a kick-ass game of media Ping-Pong.

First, it started with outstanding content, spoofing every stereotype of masculinity they could come up with through clever writing and picture-perfect casting. As soon as a bare-chested Mustafa finished gliding around from one paperback-romance scenario to another, reassuring women that even if their man didn’t look like him, they could smell like him if they stopped using lady-scented body wash, millions of people rewound their DVRs and watched the ad again. And again. Then they started talking about it on Facebook and Twitter and making spoof videos on YouTube.

Thanks to the TV ad, millions of people–women, especially–now felt something for Isaiah Mustafa, and were linking his manly abs to the Old Spice brand. So, five months and a second

TV spot later, when P&G marketers used Twitter’s promoted trend ad platform to ask Old Spice followers on Twitter and Facebook, as well as users on Reddit and Digg, to submit questions for the Old Spice Man, they replied enthusiastically. People voted for their favorite questions, and the winners received personal replies from the Man himself. Old Spice Man also initiated contact with celebrity influencers, including George Stephanopoulos, Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, and Kevin Rose, who, not coincidentally, happen to have large Twitter followings. The Internet went wild as people found out they could talk directly to the man who could ride a horse backward and catch a birthday cake while sawing through a kitchen. Over the course of two days, Mustafa taped about two hundred real-time videos responding to fans’ questions.

The Old Spice campaign wasn’t cheap. The production values were high for video, the actor cost money, a team had to keep track of all of those mentions of Old Spice zipping around the

Internet, the scripts were being written by four writers as fast as the questions came in, and the whole thing started with a multimillion-dollar TV ad buy. And yet, the company decided to spend additional money on promoted tweets, a brand-new and completely unproven Twitter advertising channel. What that indicates is that someone in the company, or at Wieden and Kennedy, the ad agency they were working with, understood one of the major Thank You Economy principles: it is worth casting a line into micro-trend ponds; they are less crowded, less noisy, and less expensive than the bigger ones in which everyone else is fishing. In the TYE, these small ponds will appear with greater and greater frequency. The likelihood is that they will dry up quickly, too. But when used properly, micro trends can provide a fresh channel by which brands can tell their story to a new audience. First-user advantage matters more now than it ever did.

Did the Campaign Work?

It depends on whom you ask. For example, sales of Old Spice Body Wash, which were already on the rise, rose sharply–by 55 percent–over the three months following the first aired TV commercial, then soared by 107 percent (a statistic that included me, because I bought my first stick of Old Spice during that time) around the time the response videos began showing, but some seem to question whether the uptick might have been due to a two-for-one coupon promotion rather than a well-integrated social media campaign. There are two things we do know to be true, though:

The earned media was fierce. Practically every marketing and tech blogger, and almost every media and news outlet in the country, covered the story. The value and reach of that media coverage has to be worth far more than a bunch of full-page print ads in Maxim or Cosmo. Old Spice’s YouTube channel reported more than 11 million views and over 160,000 subscribers. Eleven million impressions–not the worst number I’ve ever seen. And, Proctor & Gamble now has data on 160,000 people they didn’t have before, and they can use that data to remarket to those consumers. How much is it going to cost them this time? Zero.

Could a smaller brand with a lesser budget have pulled off the Old Spice campaign? Yes and no. If the talent was there, absolutely. However, we can’t underestimate the weight of the millions of dollars the company spent in creating opportunities for the public to form an emotional attachment to the Old Spice Man. But Old Spice could have spent twice what it did, and if the talent hadn’t been as strong, nor the writing as smart, the ad would have been forgotten as soon as it had run, assuming it was even noticed at all. A brand that spent only $30,000 and got fewer fans wouldn’t necessarily lose if it invested in a relationship with each fan. Followthrough counts for a lot in the Thank You Economy.