I See A Cyber Lion In Someone’s Future

I’ve been waiting to see what Iain Tait would bring to Wieden+Kennedy, aside from another British accent. Well, the waiting is over…
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is giving much credit to Tait for Old Spice’s “Man on a Horse” personal video responses, which is fast becoming the social media marketing story/campaign of the year.

Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, is leading the effort. “In a way there’s nothing magical that we’ve done here,” he explained by phone this afternoon. “We just brought a character to life using the social channels we all [social media geeks] use every day. But we’ve also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time.”
Tait says that the primary differentiator between this campaign and others is how closely technical and social media specialists are working with the creative team. “We brought social media experts right into the creative process,” he told me. Tell that to the next person who claims that all so-called social media experts are just hot-air. Tait’s own savvy no doubt played a large role in the success of the campaign as well.
“If the message that comes out of this is that you can make TV commercials in 30 mins, then we’re all out of a job,” Tait jokes. “This is something new. We’re operating on Internet time but with a level of quality you’d get on a TV slot. That combination was what really got many peoples’ attention.”

One thing that’s not new here is W+K’s ability to create great advertising that features strong characters and kick ass copy. That they could do it 87 times in one day, that is new. I can’t quite imagine keeping that pace for long, but I can see where one might start channeling this stuff. At any rate, hats off to the client, the actor and the agency on this.
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