P&G, makers of men’s aftershave brand Old Spice, aren’t particularly well known for embracing digital marketing, or for interesting social media campaigns, or for anything other than making men smell like … well, older men.

But, Old Spice have undergone a bit of a rebrand recently, starting with their new logo:

logo Interesting Social Media Campaign From Old Spice

I haven’t cut that off by the way, that’s how it’s supposed to look.

Along with the new logo has come a new, younger feeling brand image, website and a range of new men’s toiletries. Credit where credit’s due, they’ve actually done a good job; the website’s excellent and the new branding actually feels well thought out and properly targeted.

To go along with their ‘younger’ approach, Old Spice teamed up with advertising and marketing firm Wieden & Kennedy, launching a new and innovative social media campaign involving custom video responses to consumer questions.

Actor Isaiah Mustafa stars in the video as character ‘Old Spice man’, recording and putting out over 180 videos (so far) featuring answers to questions recieved via social networking channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Digg.

old spice man 550x314 Interesting Social Media Campaign From Old Spice

Questions came in from brand consumers, the general public and celebrities, including Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Ellen DeGeneres, Alyssa Milano and Digg founder Kevin Rose.

The video responses are not only personalised and extremely well done, they’re incredibly funny, which is impressive considering they were made in such a short amount of time. Have a look at a few over at the Old Spice website if you don’t believe me…

Make no mistake here, this is not only an example of an impressive and well-worked rebranding exercise, but will undoubtedly be referenced as case-study for how a brand can use social media effectively. Old Spice have managed to demonstrate a way of engaging with individual fans in an entertaining, innovative, broad reaching and real-time manner. People will be taking notes from this campaign (by which I mean stealing ideas from it) for a long time to come.

The campaign appears to have been effective too, according to statistics released on Mashable this week:

NUMBER OF VIDEO VIEWS: 5.9 million
NUMBER OF VIDEO COMMENTS: 22,500

And that’s split over approximately 187 videos, which is nothing if not impressive, particularly for a brand that would have been seen as out of touch just a few months ago. It’s not clear if the campaign has increased the sales of the new Old Spice products, but to be honest if sales did increase it would be a pleasant by-product for the company, who were probably just looking to succesfully rebrand in a digital environment.

If you haven’t seen the videos yet, go and have a look, and if you’re a business, take note – this is one of the many reasons you shouldn’t be ignoring social media.