With one last video thanking everyone that got involved

Jul 15, 2010 10:49 GMT  ·  By

By now, there’s no way you could have missed the Old Spice guy phenomenon that took the web by storm with an endless torrent of highly-targeted videos. Aimed at celebrities, bloggers and anyone with a Twitter account and an interesting enough question, over the span of two days, Old Spice shot close to two hundred short YouTube videos which have been universally praised.

But all great things do have to come to an end, particularly if there’s a giant fish falling out of nowhere in your bathroom, and the last video was uploaded to YouTube a few hours ago.

In it, the Old Spice guy reveals a slightly more vulnerable side, admitting that he is but “one ridiculously handsome man” and couldn’t respond to everyone that wrote him. He does note, however, that all those that did reach out to him are now his closest internet friends. This comes after a video in which actor Isaiah Mustafa, who plays the Old Spice guy, answers his own daughter in a video, even more ‘meta’ than when he answered himself yesterday.

It’s all over now, but the product of these very prolific two days will live on forever as a testament of what man and marketing dollars can achieve. Plenty of companies have tried to create viral campaigns before, but this one will probably end up in the textbooks.

Handled perfectly from start to finish, the campaign managed to tame even the web’s most vicious crowds, YouTube commenters and 4chan. YouTubers were mostly on their best behavior and many of the comments are not only understandable, they’re actually positive. And if there’s one thing that 4chan hates is people talking about 4chan, which makes its positive reaction even more surprising.

The videos do make it look easy, that’s the whole concept behind the Old Spice guy, but they’re the product of a very talented and very focused team. Created by the Wieden + Kennedy agency, the creative team along with social media experts, the film crew and Isaiah Mustafa all worked closely together to produce almost 200 videos in just two days.