I turned 24 on Sunday.

A 24^th birthday is a seemingly insignificant blip. It’s a milestone not worth remembering, another random point in my individual timeline. The pivot-point birthdays, the ones that open up new possibilities and endless opportunity just by proxy of my age (16, 18, 21) are behind me.

But, given that it’s a nice time to stop and reflect on the past 8,760 days, here are a few things I’ve learned on this crazy adventure we call life:

You’re never as old as you feel and you’ll never be this young again.

You will miss an endless amount of opportunities. You will always feel like you missed some turning point in your life, and you will always be haunted by the road not taken, the girl you never talked to, the job you never accepted. You will feel regret. The more time you spend going down that imaginary road, the more time you’re wasting. Spend your time focusing on the opportunities you caught and what you’re doing with them. This is your life. Right now. It’s all you have, so you might as well enjoy it. There are very few pains worth holding onto, and regret isn’t one of them.

Own your vices, but get rid of your demons: Everyone needs something to hold onto. Some people (like me) find solace in pop culture, some (also like me) find it in food and drink, some find it in religion. We all have vices; some are good, some are evil, some are both, some are neither. The moment you let any of these things take over your life, you might need to reconsider your connection to them. Very few people are strong enough to do this on their own.

There’s a healthy balance between outside influence and intuition.  A lot of people will feel like giving you advice (I’m doing it right now, and I’ve done it before), and you will be tempted to listen. They will say that they know what’s best for you, and they have more experience than you, and that they’re right. They will poke and prod and nudge you in directions you don’t want to go. These people will try to drown out the little voice in your head, the one that tells you yes or no or stop or go. Don’t let anyone muffle your inner voice.

You will feel awkward sometimes. Remnants of that insecure teenage version of you will stick around and taunt you. That’s normal. Everyone goes through the same basic experiences you do: the thrill of a first kiss, the heartbreak of a first love lost, the explosion of hormones, the general gawkiness. The best you can hope for is that you take the good things about your early years (the hope, the excitement, the child-like wonder, the openness to connection) with you and leave most of the other junk behind.

You will never be perfect at anything, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying.

It is never okay to stop learning.  School’s over, and you’ll probably never go back. It’s up to you to read books, to devour culture, to jump into new situations head-first.  Hopefully you’ll learn from your successes and your failures. Hopefully you’ll learn from others. The only thing you can do is try to learn how to be a better person.  

Friends will arrive, friends will disappear. Meeting friends and potential love interests only gets harder, more forced, and more awkward as time goes on. You’ll like people you work with, and maybe you’ll like your neighbors, and maybe you’ll like your girlfriend’s friends, but you’ll never have an experience like high school or college again. Those friends will understand you better than most people, but they’ll be taken by new cities and new people and some of them will fade away. Try to maintain your connections; it’s pretty easy these days. You don’t have a lot of excuses to let those connections die out.

There are a lot of shiny things in this world. There are distractions everywhere. The hardest thing in this world of so much noise, so much bullshit, and so many different things warring for your attention is to find something real to concentrate on. Try to devote your time to whatever makes you nuts with passion, whatever burn inside you, the things you feel with every piece of your being. Nobody else can tell you what those are. Figure out how to enjoy silence and things that happen in nature.

Here’s to another 24 years.

[Art courtesy of Lauren Krukowski. Click the pic for more]

[November is National Novel Writing Month, and while I'm way too busy at work to actually devote much time to writing, I'm trying to give tiny stories a shot]

I’m a rare case; at the early age of 22 I was diagnosed with a hard-to-cure syndrome known as “a real job.” Others like me have the same symptoms: constant fatigue, irritability, disposable income, shrinking social life, and general maladjustment. We’re hopeful that they’ll find a cure in our lifetime, but none of us are holding our breath. Like everyone else, we spend our weeks waiting for Friday to come.

Luckily for us, we found medicine called Happy Hour. Happy Hour was a placebo that tricked us into thinking we were still in college. Over a few drinks, we could tell jokes about the rest of our coworkers and vent about all of the assholes and idiots we dealt with day to day. We did this without looking around at the rest of the patrons, because none of them looked all that happy anymore. We avoided the glum faces as much as we could and kept moving forward. Friday was only a few days away.

***

It was 4:59 on the first Friday of fall. The next 60 seconds went by at a snail’s pace, but once it hit 5:00 I remembered that I had about another hour of work to do. That’s alright, I told myself; the time between now and the night always drags by, and I might as well get something done. So I worked for another hour, hit the road and the liquor store and was home by 7:00. I was exhausted, but I still felt allergic to my couch. I had a whiskey soda, took a shower, and had another drink. I was revived and revved up, ready for another night.

My phone buzzed and I pulled it out to see what it wanted. “What are you doing tonight?”

A text from her was always welcome. She was a pretty girl, one that always had to deal with her looks overshadowing the rest of who she was. Girls like her always have an underlying sadness, as if they know they’ll be expected to play the role of the pretty, oblivious girl forever. She liked when people treated her a little differently. Before the party, I asked her and some other friends over to pregame.

Pregaming is the sacred art of imbibing with your friends before heading out into the night. It’s something we forgot to forget from college, a relic of a bygone era. It is a way to spend time with people you really like, not just the people you spent time with because they recognize you from school or work. It is an armor you put on before heading out to the dark bars or crowded parties. Smiles are brighter, laughs are louder, lives less inhibited. In the wintertime, it has the extra benefit of making everything warmer.

So we had a few drinks, turned the music up, and reveled in the crisp autumn night. Fall is the secret hero of the seasons here. Summer gets a lot of adoration in Madison; the Terrace is in full swing, the Farmers’ Market is vibrant and swarming with young families, and the city is oscillating between the sweltering summer heat of the day and the cool Midwestern breeze of the night. It is an excellent place to spend your lazy summers, watching the days float on like the sailboats over Lake Mendota’s waves.

But autumn is when the city reboots. The students reenter the city, the freshmen so eager and excited to start a new chapter of their lives, the seniors feeling the anxiety of their future saturating the air. In autumn the Badgers get back on the field, and the library is again filled with students pretending to get work done but really just casing the place for future bedmates. In autumn, the blood rushes back to the heart of the city and the world begins again.

After the third round of beer, gin or whiskey-whatevers and the second game of “ride the bus” we were ready to head out. The party wasn’t very far away; only a few blocks separated us from what was a comfortable get-together and what would be a wild mix of people I wish I never met, people I was avoiding, and a few people I genuinely liked. I paid the host and we received a red solo cup so we could have a few stale beers from the keg. Those cups were more artifacts from college we wanted so desperately to outgrow. We found an open spot in the corner of a room, and had our friends come to us.

As far as parties go, it was an uneventful, run-of-the-mill hour. We talked about how our jobs were slowly killing us, made fun of the host’s shitty idea of good music, and shared a few stories. We told jokes about the people at the party we didn’t like, relived a few of the glory days in college, and went about our night without looking back. There was nothing special about the party, but all of it hasn’t grown old yet.

The cup over the tap meant it was time to leave the party in search of somewhere a little darker and a lot more anonymous. There’s nothing worse than a dry party full of people you don’t want to know, so we flocked to the streets once more in search of a better buzz and a few more laughs.

***

My dad was a PC before being a PC meant being John Hodgman. I’ve worked on a Windows-based computer since I was playing Commander Keen as a three year old. We never had a Macintosh, but I do remember using iMacs in 4^th and 5^th grade. Even to a PC, losing the co-founder of Apple is a pretty big moment.

Yesterday, my generation’s visionary died, and we’re a little broken up about it. You can see it in the flurry of sincere tweets, obituaries, and blog posts from a normally-disaffected generation. He was our John Lennon, a dreamer who seemed to believe in himself and his own ideas on a supernatural level. I saw more than one tweet fly by into the ether last night about how losing Steve Jobs is my generation’s version of losing Walt Disney, someone else whose ideas were so brilliant and so new. People are actually laying flowers for Steve Jobs, a former executive at Apple stores he helped create. That is absolutely unheard of in an era whe

re our nation’s youth are protesting in front of Wall Street, an era where we distrust anyone wearing a suit and cast shame on executives across the country.

Steve Jobs showed us why we should Think Different. He hired the brightest people and expected them to make the best products. He pushed his employees to the edge because on the edge, legends are born. He proved to us that breaking the rules isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the only thing to do. We learned from Steve that if you’re good enough, you make your own rules. Through his work, he taught us that simplicity in design trumps complexity every time. His products showed us that ease of use is a beautiful thing.

Steve Jobs taught us that sometimes, things break, and the world will crush you. He also taught us that there’s freedom in losing everything. After being fired from Apple in the 80’s, he could have sat on his couch, wallowing around with a bag of cheetos and daytime TV like the rest of us. He started Pixar instead. He taught a generation of underpaid, underemployed, and overworked people that life is too short to work in a job you don’t like. We learned from Steve that settling for a life we don’t want is far worse than feeling lost for a little while, and we each take that lesson with us well into our twenties.

The fact that the majority of my generation probably heard about his death via one of his products says more about the impact of Steve Jobs than words ever can. But Steve Jobs means more to us than the phones in our pockets, laptops in our backpacks and music in our ears. He showed us what we could be if we were brave enough and heard our inner voice in a clear and resonating tone. He was a genius, someone who changed the world, and he will always be an inspiration to each and every one of us.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

I didn’t take 9/11 very seriously when it happened (I wrote about comedy’s place in tragedy last year). I was 13, and I lived in a suburb in Minnesota. The day was filled with jokes about planes aiming for the buildings in our town: Go ahead, take out the teen center and ice rink. Nail the McDonald’s downtown.  That was how my classmates and I felt that day; there was no danger, no threat to anyone close, no damage done in our world.  We made jokes because we didn’t understand why our teachers were so solemn, so quietly fearful of how everything would turn out and what the ramifications of the attack would be.

They remembered the draft and they remembered Vietnam, so at that moment all of our teachers and parents probably had visions of their students and sons forced to wear camouflage, ready to fight another guerrilla enemy in a long war. History was again going to be repeating itself, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

But there wasn’t a draft, only a generation of volunteers heading to the Middle East to fight for whatever we had lost that day. And many battles have been fought, and many lives have been lost, and many things will never be the same.

What happened and what changed and what evolved in the last 10 years is nothing short of astonishing.

We’re still involved in the same wars. We’ve seen the feeling of unity and “God Bless America” patriotism mutate into polarized political factions.  One of them is an overwhelming celebration of anger, fear and jingoism hiding as“Average American” patriotism. The other party is full of idealists hiding under a veil of irony and cynicism because they just might actually believe in the “Hope and Change” rhetoric of yesteryear. Everything is black and white. And anyone in the middle better duck and cover, because there isn’t a place for reasonable people who see value in both sides. Politics isn’t a buffet, it’s a prix fixe menu.  If you aren’t with us, you’re against us.

Economically, we’ve seen empires crumble, then banks crumble, and then we crumbled. Jobs were lost, and many more Americans had to deal with layoffs and job reductions. Gas shot up, loans went unpaid, and houses still remain foreclosed. The rich get richer, the poor poorer. Again, the middle is no place to be.

We’ve now fully realized that we’re on our own. The institutions won’t make us whole. Our political parties will only keep fracturing and moving towards the poles. The banks will let us down, religion will not save us, schools can barely teach us, and the government cannot protect us.

But, as the Springsteen song goes, “at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” We still have hope. The internet has evolved from a place for nerds to talk about episodes of The Simpsons and Star Trek into an all-encompassing ecosystem of its own. Social media creates communities of geographically-displaced human beings, and is even aiding in revolutions across the world. Pop culture is making us smarter and more aware. There is some light, even if it isn’t that much.

There will be good years, and bad years, and we will keep moving forward. Just remember that good things will keep happening. Kids will still laugh, friends and families will still get together, and comedians will still tell jokes. We will still smile. We have our freedom, and no group or institution or moment has been able to take that away. And we will never forget one of the moments that changed everything and defined our generation.

Email wasn’t first social phenomenon the internet brought to the world, but it was the first to break through to the masses. It is behind the curtains; you have to be invited into a conversation. Maybe the person on the other end is a parent, maybe it’s a coworker, maybe it’s a friend. Email is a less urgent telephone call.

Then, Facebook arrived. It’s a safe way for long-lost lovers, could-have-beens, and just-missed-the-moments to reconnect and say all the things they wish they said years ago, when they were in their prime. It’s a time machine.

Facebook is also a way for college kids to get to know each other without really getting to know each other. Facebook is an avenue for you to spit out tiny bits of trivia about yourself: you like this movie, these are your favorite quotes. Here are a few pictures you’ve hand-selected that define you. It is you, but always the best side of you.

Before you know it, a few pokes back and forth with that girl you may or may not have met on Facebook turns into a wall conversation, which turns into going out together, and so on. Facebook is the most socially acceptable form of online dating we have. It is your past, present and future all rolled-up into one package.

Status updates brought Twitter to the party, where someone (or anyone) can get a quick snapshot of what you are thinking or feeling right now. It’s a way to share what you find interesting. It is a reassurance that you can shout out to the vast emptiness of the internet and know that someone, somewhere, is probably listening.

Twitter is an avenue for serendipitous social connections. It is far better than Facebook at cultivating a spontaneous, sometimes meaningful relationship with another person, regardless of where that person is physically located. It is the movie “Crash,” translated into ones and zeros and available to anyone with an internet connection.

Then came Foursquare. If people care what you had for lunch and what you’re thinking right now, then they’ll probably care about where you are right now, right? Foursquare rewards movement, going new places, and traveling in large crowds. Through Foursquare, the internet turns your world into the Oregon Trail.

And then there’s Instagram, one of the newer portals we have. If everyone cares what you’re doing right now and where you’re doing it, then surely they’ll want to see it through your eyes. Instagram is as close as an outsider can presently get to feeling what you feel .  Instagram lets you easily and wordlessly show the world things you have created that you judge to be interesting and beautiful.

The one pattern I can pull from this timeline is how much more personal everything is getting. If you started out with email, you were having one-on-one conversations with a previously established connection. Facebook allowed you to share tiny, trivial bits of yourself with others and has since turned into a five, ten, or fifty year reunion. Twitter and Foursquare convinced you that the world cares about where you are right now and what you’re thinking. Instagram invites others to see the uniqueness and beauty of the world like you do.

The social web is getting more personal, more intimate. Piece by piece, you are shedding your protection. You are standing naked in front of millions of people, so to speak. I think that’s interesting, and it makes me intrigued by what the future brings.

On a particularly moving episode of Mad Men this season, Don Draper fell apart. The only woman who ever truly knew him (Spoiler alert! He’s not actually Don Draper) had died, and he was having a very hard time dealing with it. For the first time in the series’ run, Don Draper broke down and cried.

12 hours later, an image of Don Draper crying exploded across the internet. Within hours of its creation, Sad Don Draper was the internet flavor of the week. It became an internet meme.

What’s a meme?

According to the term’s originator, Richard Dawkins, you should think of a meme as a tiny bit of culture that gets passed along like a gene. A meme is a cultural virus. It is passed between humans in person, through word-of-mouth, and through various forms of media until it remixes itself or reaches extinction.

An “internet meme” spreads primarily from the ground up on the internet. This means that memes don’t usually originate from Google or Facebook, but rather 4Chan, the lawless, “international waters” of the internet.  It then “infects” others through word-of-mouth, email, blogs and social media. Memes are all around us.

If you’re my age, you probably remember the Hamster Dance (and the mere mention of it probably brings back that horrible, horrible song). More recent memes you’re probably familiar with include The Rickroll (click the link, I DARE YOU), The Bed Intruder Song, Keyboard Cat and, of course, LOLcats.

Sounds quite a bit like going viral, right?

Yep. “Going viral” simply refers to a meme’s ability to infect culture online, often with a brand message. The most recent (and largely successful) viral campaign was the Old Spice Guy, Isaiah Mustafa. While that campaign was the result of previous paid media (TV ads came before the viral phenomenon), Old Spice’s viral Youtube campaign will go down in advertising history.

Brands understand the power of viral videos; word-of-mouth spreads, and consumers trust other consumers more than advertisers. While most word-of-mouth is still spread offline (the proverbial “watercooler” is still alive and well), viral videos have a large impact on offline culture. This is why Tosh.0, a show devoted to viral videos and internet culture, often gets bigger ratings than The Daily Show. Internet culture has become our culture. Like it or not, we are Generation Meme.

Let’s use memes to sell stuff!

Naturally, brands are trying to capitalize on our love of memes. They’re trying to find out what makes something go viral so that they can create the newest viral masterpiece. Some advertisers are beginning to use viral stars in their ads; most recently, the The Double Rainbow Guy was featured in an ad for Microsoft. So, will we continue to see more and more memes show up in ads?

It really depends on how fast the advertisers can react to culture. Old Spice’s viral campaign was about as low-latency as it gets; people were sending out questions via social media to Old Spice, and within a day an ad had been made and aired on Youtube. However, this isn’t the norm. By the time a lot of advertisers will have devised a script, developed a budget, and produced the commercial, the meme would already be decreasing in popularity or extinct.

The cycle time for a meme (from initial discovery to extinction) is getting much shorter. As soon as one meme pops up, another will soon follow. Memes are popping up weekly. This means that advertisers are going to have to get the approval of clients and create an entire ad in very little time. This is not easy to do.

For advertisers, it’s really a race to see if they can put together a coherent ad before the meme loses its place in pop culture. If there’s one thing worse than not making an ad at all, it’s trying to capitalize on pop culture after the fad is over and looking uncool and out-of-date (though, sometimes that’s the point).

I guess the real question is whether or not memes will stay around in culture long term. Is Sad Keanu going to be our generation’s Mona Lisa? Absolutely not. But for now, they make us laugh. As long as the internet allows us to share all the strange and wonderful things we find, memes will have a place in our funny bones.

What do you think: Are memes now a part of pop culture or are they just odd spasms of internet weirdness? Can advertisers use them without “selling out?”

[10/13 Update: Oh, they added Facebook into your Klout score now too. So, theoretically Facebook can affect your job search (beyond the random drunk pictures, etc)]

Alright, so you’ve done everything possible to look like an ideal job candidate. You created a top-notch resume filled with more volunteer work than Mother Teresa and more internship experience than Kenneth the Page. Never mind that it hasn’t been released yet, you’re ALREADY proficient in Microsoft Office 2015. There are no pictures of you doing kegstands on Facebook, and you have even taken some of my advice and learned how to use social media to get hired. You’re ready to enter the professional world. You’re pretty much a lock to land a job, right?

Well, let me ask you one more question: What’s your Klout score?

Whoa there cowboy, what’s a Klout score?

Klout bills itself as “The Standard for Influence” online. Basically, it’s a service that measures how “influential” you are online. You simply plug in your Twitter handle and it will generate a score between 0-100 for you. The more influential you are and the wider your reach is online, the higher your Klout score is. It is based on a number of different variables, like the size of your audience, if your content is being acted upon (retweeted, etc), and the influence your audience has. If you want a more detailed explanation, go here. This is all fine and dandy if you’re a little vain like me and just want to know what your score is (a few years from now, everyone might be “Klouting” themselves instead of using that old-timey Google).

It doesn’t mean anything, right?

Well, it might mean something. I had been aware of Klout for a few months now, but I wasn’t aware of its clout (see what I did there?) in the recruiting world until today. To me, it was shocking to see that some employers consider your Klout score as part of the application process. Said in a more alarmist way, you may be denied some job opportunities just because you aren’t popular enough on Twitter.

That’s right. 20 years ago, you could do anything you wanted in your personal time, and as long as your background check turned up clean, you could probably land a nice job. Fast forward to 2007, and you had to make sure that your MySpace and Facebook pages were “clean” to get a job. Our generation is now faced with another employment roadblock: “influence.” Now we have to worry about whether or not we’re being retweeted and if we have enough influential followers. It adds a whole new layer to the already-complicated job search.

But don’t quit and join the circus yet…

It’s not quite time to panic and give up. If you’re looking to be an accountant or electrical engineer, you’re probably never going to have to worry about how influential you are online. Influence is only an issue for in industries like social media marketing, advertising, and media. Even if you are in one of those industries, don’t jump ship yet. If any company uses only Klout scores to weed out the “bad” candidates, you probably don’t want to work for them anyways, because they don’t get it. As Edward Boches, a very influential person in the ad game on and offline (he has a Klout score of 52, OMG), notes:

[Klout] appears to emphasize the impact of one’s “push” content on Twitter and Facebook – reach, influence, re-tweeting. But it can’t identify the rest of the qualities – conversation strategy, flexibility, timeliness, and authenticity – that a smart agency or brand should look for in a social strategist.

Essentially, it’s not measuring the quality of your content, nor is it measuring other important qualities like how quickly you respond and how authentic you are. Just like a résumé can’t tell you everything about a candidate, Klout can’t measure your personality or your fit with the company’s culture. It’s not a complete picture.

I fear that social media illiterate employers are going to use Klout score as a shortcut, much like looking at the number of followers one has. Instead of actually READING someone’s tweets, they’re just going to check out Klout and get an incomplete view of that person. They’d use it like a pre-résumé to weed out the “unworthy ones.” That would not be good, and a lot of stellar employees would get passed over because of it.

Building influence and followers on Twitter is a time-intensive process. I hope that I’m not instantly disregarded because I only have a Klout score in the teens, because I’d like to think that my opinions are valuable and the content I spread is worthwhile. Because of technology and the economy, it’s harder than ever to find a job. I just hope that recruiters don’t put too much trust in “influencer” metrics, and if they do happen to use something like Klout, I hope they take the time to actually read my Twitter feed first.

One final question: Can you guess who has a score of 100 on Klout?

What do you think of Klout? Do you think it’s fair that some companies use it during the screening process?

Don Draper and his rag-tag team of advertising misfits at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce come back to the small screen today, and that’s a good enough reason to write about it. You should give the show a try. Unless you’ve been living under a culture-proof rock for the last 4 or so years, “Mad Men” is an award-winning show on AMC about advertisers in the 60’s. That’s the abbreviated version. If you watch the show religiously, you know it’s really about the existential crisis of a man who never is quite sure of who he is or who he wants to be, set in a 1960’s Ad Agency. It’s a time machine to an era full of drinking, smoking, and philandering, but also an era full of change and empowerment. I could continue the pretentious drivel for a while, but I figured it’d probably be easier to persuade you to watch the show through quotes and videos, and a little commentary in between.

Read more…

As one of my loyal readers (all fourteen of you, and that’s being optimistic), you probably know that I like Twitter. Quite a bit. I’ve written about it before. Twitter is a portal to the collective thoughts of the world. I recently commented about it on a post about why I love Twitter:

I think Twitter can fundamentally change the way those with little industry experience look for work. Connecting with the right people, posting high-quality information, and making insightful observations on Twitter could potentially catch the eye of employers. It’s an interesting new way to think about job hunting for my generation.

Twitter can change how you find a job. See, I spent a good chunk of my senior year in college sending in resumes, writing cover letter after cover letter, attending job fairs, and occasionally landing an interview because of it. This method I’m going to call the “push” method of job hunting. This is how those with little-to-no experience have been doing it for quite some time. In my case, this was (and continues to be) like shoving a boulder up a hill or getting Zooey Deschanel to marry me.

Already Married? Rats

But here we are in the digital age, where mere mortals like me can have real conversations with C-Level employees and thought leaders in the industry using Twitter. This is enough to make me think that perhaps there is a better way to find a job. I’m going to call it the “pull” method.

Read more…

By this point, you’d have to be under a very large rock for a very long time to have missed the Old Spice ads. The campaign went viral when it began and continues to garner a lot of attention with each new ad. The campaign managed to get star Isaiah Mustafa a deal with NBC. It also won the Grand Prix Award at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, which is sort of like the Best Picture Oscar. Additionally, the ad was recently nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Commercial, and will most likely win (with their momentum, none of the others can really compare). So, what makes this ad campaign so special? Why does it connect with us, and why did it go viral?

Awe-Inspiring

The New York Times ran an article that says we share things that inspire awe. It states that in order for something to inspire awe, “Its scale is large, and it requires ‘mental accommodation’ by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.” Now let’s look at the Old Spice ads. They definitely have that “how did they do it?” quality that many viral ads have. Curiosity piques interest. However, the ads aren’t doctored. They are well-known to be authentic and shot in one sequence. It was all done without CGI or any digital funny-business. This is certainly awe inspiring, because it makes us view the world of commercials (in today’s digital age) in a different way; we’re so used to over-the-top CGI effects (thanks, Michael Bay and James Cameron) that a spectacle like these commercials (without the help of CGI) is certainly interesting. The scale of the commercials is definitely large enough: TV ads reach a huge chunk of the population.

They’re Actually Funny

I don’t know a single person who doesn’t smile every time they see the commercials. I’ve seen most of them many, many times and I still laugh. The commercials are so over-the-top ridiculous that they’re incredibly funny. They take every Fabio-esque stereotype of male masculinity (including an un-ironic love of mustaches and riding on a white horse topless) and throw it in your face. It would be annoying, but Old Spice is aware of the stereotypes and understands the ridiculous nature of them, so it is able to make fun of itself. This sort of humor connects directly with our generation; we love satire, and we love to see big corporations not take themselves so seriously.

Sharable: These ads are inherently sharable. Just from personal experience, it had a TON of morning-after watercooler buzz in real life, and it went viral on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the internet. They’re short enough that anyone (even those of you at the office) can view it without getting into any real trouble. The Old Spice phenomenon got so big that if you didn’t know about it, you felt left out.

They Listen and Respond

Old Spice has a Twitter account (@OldSpice, naturally), and they LISTEN to us. We know this because the account tweets back at individual users. The brand has even started to respond via personalized YouTube videos. The takeaway here is that if you want to get and KEEP our attention, you have to listen to us and respond within a reasonable time. If you do, your brand will seem more personal and authentic. We like that. It also helps that the replies are pretty hilarious.

Of course, as with any cultural phenomenon, the ads have their detractors who say the campaign is good for quick laughs but may hurt the brand in the long-term. Others cite that all the awards and buzz doesn’t always translate into sales. Even if it hasn’t exactly rose sales yet, ask anyone which brand of deodorant first pops into his or her head and I would bet Old Spice is it. Many companies would kill for that top-of-mind brand recall and awareness. Whatever the case, these ads have bored a vuvuzela-sized hole in the zeitgeist and have made advertising a little more fun. Well done, Old Spice.

Update: 8/25/2010

After the social media blitzkrieg, Old Spice’s sales soared. Mustafa eventually won the Emmy, and everything about this campaign was deemed a success. There have already been a number of copycats, but none have matched up to the original. This campaign is sure to ride off on its white horse (in only a towel, of course) into the annals of advertising history.

(Photo via Urlesque)