Old Spice Challenge

Via Ad Week, I’ve been taking a look at the Old Spice Experience Challenge, which is being promoted in combination with 360voice. I think the idea is superb, a great way to connect with target influencers by providing something that is really useful and fun to them.

Old Spice is looking to build on the gaming experience with Gamerscore, often used as a social currency among gamers, according to Story. By enlisting this and using the grassroots appeal of 360Voice.com, which hosts the competition and will promote it on its site, the brand should be able to achieve authenticity with tough-to-impress gamers, he said. In addition to placements on 360Voice.com, Old Spice will run ads on other gaming sites in the coming weeks to promote the effort. It will not advertise the campaign on Xbox.

Old Spice had previously targeted gamers with a competition which was a fixed challenge with one set of prizes. What they are doing here is completely different. Anyone with a XBox gamer tag, a Gold account and an an account at 360Voice can take part, by creating different challenges for them and their friends to play. Each challenge results in additional points in your Gamer Account and the winner of each challenge is the one who gains the most as part of the competition. Old Spice provides the prizes, ranging from Best Buy vouchers to full gaming systems and also provide the engine to track games and scores. The rest is up to the gamers to create and manage the challenges. At the time of writing they have 115 active challenges, 221 pending challenges and over 1700 participants. That may not seem a lot, but the key of this is that buzz around it - 16k mentions on sites, including all the big gaming sites, from this and the previous challenge. The brand is getting recognition in a key age group, where it faces stiff opposition from Axe, and doing it in a way that makes it mean something without it being intrusive advertising

I can’t even begin to explain how impressed I am at this, taking a great idea, getting corporate sponsorship to benefit the users, and bringing it to the site in such a way that it blends in perfectly with the existing 360voice… congrats! Quote from DaKing240

They’ve deliberately not used in-game advertising, but focused on site sponsorships and blogger outreach. Great idea, love it.