Wieden’s global interactive creative director Iain Tait has actually addressed part of this post in a good read at: http://bit.ly/cuoXkc

How do we know it’s not going to continue the chat? True the videos have stopped, after being kept up for an impressively intense period, it is quite possible that it will.

As for the non click through to buy. I think if there had been one, people would have said it lessened the social media-ness of the campaign, a damned if they do and if they don’t. Personally I like that they don’t. I also suspect that the main objective of this campaign was not sales but raising awareness and changing perception, both of which it has done admirably.

How long do you think people want to have a meaningful conversation about something like Old Spice? And do the margins on their products make it possible to pay a team of real people for a successful ongoing conversation? For those reasons I don’t think FMCG are able to be significant in true social media engagement. This was just an old style campaign that used common social media as channels to enable and measure the viral effect and outsource the capacity it needed. Probably in a clever way that acknowledged the exposure this gave to those channels themselves as a result of the campaign.

I’d suggest that — while the campaign doesn’t tick all the boxes that social media gurus might like — it certainly made use of social media platforms (Twitter and YouTube), of social media techniques (influencer identification, response-based messaging, making the audience the story.)

Worth pointing out that W+K has form in this area.

Here’s the secret. Successful social media campaigns aren’t simply about customer service and CRM. It’s about taking those few brief engagements one has, and making a story out of them…

This isn’t game changing; but it should point other agencies in the right direction. Ignore ad agencies at your peril!

It begs the question about how distinct campaigns and everyday communication fit together and the long term future of agencies.

In the PR world you often get a thin wall between campaign/project and retained/in-house activity. For those not in PR it is can be very roughly thought of as one off activity and regular communication with the media.

While this wasn’t the case at the start, as PR matured as a profession more in-house roles sprang up and agencies changed as well.

Today’s agency is brought in for their specialised services or to deal with missing expertise (usually for SMEs), a resource requirement or just because they offer better value for money and flexibility.

It is a vague long term hypothesis, but could we see something similar with digital communications agencies as social media becomes internalised and matures.

Setting up separate SM accounts and web presence for each campaign has place but probably not sustainable for company’s looking to build a long term reputation and relationships (even without considering SEO wastage and unusable customer data collected during a campaign)

Could agencies be asked to work on intense projects that lie just outside of the core activity on a single unified campaign? How do you draw the lines? How will activity integrate with existing channels? Will in-house teams share account details or divide up specific outreach tasks? Will they be asked to be asked to deal with things like SM CRM as part of the campaign, or just placed in an advisory role.

There are many many questions and it will all likely shift again in 18 months but we are in a moment of increased SM adoption and it will be interesting to see how it changes the relationship between in-house comms managers and agencies.