In a recent blog post he explores the combined potential of a national schools curriculum and the advent ofthe iPad.

Through the National Curriculum, he says, “every educator and every student throughout the nation can be drawing from and contributing to a ‘common wealth’ of shared materials, whether they be podcasts of lectures, educational chatrooms, lesson plans, and on and on and on.  As the years go by, this wealth of material will grow as more teachers and more students add their own contributions to it.  The National Curriculum isn’t a mandate, per se; it’s better to think of it as an empty Wikipedia.  All the article headings are there, all the taxonomy, all the cross references, but none of the content.  The next decade will see us all build up that base of content, so that by 2020, a decade’s worth of work will have resulted in something truly outstanding to offer both educators and students in their pursuit of curriculum goals.”

To achieve this potential, we need to change how we think about teaching, about students, about the education process itself. We must recognise teachers and students as creators of value.

“Educators spend endless hours working on lesson plans and instructional designs – they should be encouraged to share this work.  Many of them are too modest or too scared to trumpet their own hard yards – but it is something that educators and students across the nation can benefit from.  Students, as they pass through the curriculum, create their own learning materials, which must be preserved, where appropriate, for future years.

“We should do this.  We need to do this.  Right now we’re dropping the best of what we have on the floor as teachers retire or move on in their careers.  This is gold that we’re letting slip through our fingers. We live in an age where we only lose something when we neglect to capture it. We can let ourselves off easy here, because we haven’t had a framework to capture and share this pedagogy.  But now we have the means to capture, a platform for sharing – the Ultranet, and a tool which brings access to everyone – the iPad.  We’ve never had these stars aligned in such a way before.  Only just now – in 2010 – is it possible to dream such big dreams.  It won’t even cost much money.  Yes, the state and federal governments will be investing in iPads and superfast broadband connections for the schools, but everything else comes from a change in our behavior, from a new sense of the full value of our activities.  We need to look at ourselves not merely as the dispensers of education to receptive students, but as engaged participant-creators working to build a lasting body of knowledge.” [Pesce's emphasis]

How the story started

A 2009 article in Fast Company discussed Proctor and Gamble’s ambition to make Old Spice the most popular brand of men’s antiperspirant and bodywash products. Old Spice already had a YouTube channel where it posted TV ads to modest viewer numbers.

In February 2010 two short videos appeared on the Old Spice channel. These were different from previous ads — they featured Isaiah Mustafa, a handsome black actor with an attractive bass voice and an air of insouciant machismo. Suddenly Proctor and Gamble were targeting a female audience, presumably on the assumption that women buy the family’s showering products.

First came the “Did you know…?” advertisement.

The breakthrough — blogs and emails

Then the breakthrough hit — a series of quick scene and costume changes, a verbal rhythm (look over there, now back at me) and a silly punchline (“I’m on a horse.”) Since it was posted in February this advertisement has had more than 14 million views.

This one was called “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” After winning the 2010 Grand Prix for film (advertising) at Cannes, it was reposted on blogs and other web sites worldwide, the link shared via emails between friends.

The advertisement was launched in early February, the week after the Superbowl football match; this is a time of year when new advertising campaigns are launched (in the USA), analysed, critiqued and reported upon. Campaign Brief magazine claimed Old Spice had become the best-selling product in its category (in the USA).

A similar ad appeared on YouTube on 29 June and again was picked up by bloggers and social media users.

Going all the way — individual attention

That’s when things really got hot. Mainstream media personalities started mentioning the ads, in their regular gigs and via social media like Twitter. Popular online news outlets like the Huffington Post picked up the story. And two weeks later, on 12 July, Old Spice Guy started talking back directly to his fans.

The advertising agency’s creative director, Iain Tait, took a strategic approach to deciding when, how — and to whom — the video responses would be created:

“One of the unique things taking place in the studio is we have a team of social media people, we have the Old Spice community manager, we have a social media strategist, a couple of technical people, and a producer. And we’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally-relevant community.”

The team chose its targets well, even winning broad approval from the notoriously hard-to-please 4Chan online community.

On 13 July a team of video production specialists and a group of social media experts wrote, filmed, edited and published 87 personalised responses to commenters at Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Digg and other social web sites.

Old Spice Guy even delivered a marriage proposal (which was accepted).

During that week creative director Iain Tait commented:

“One thing you can sense if you’re lucky enough to be there in the studio is that they’re all having such fun doing this thing. Isaiah is loving it. Everyone who is writing it is loving it. The social media guys are loving it. And that really shines through…

“It’s a really strange thing, but that sense that people are having fun actually manages to transmit itself through the Internet. People gravitate toward things that feel like they’re being done by people who love it. That sense that everyone involved with this is loving it is a huge factor in why this is so successful.”

The end, and the aftermath

In total they shot over 150 videos in three days that week. By 15 July a visibly exhausted Old Spice Guy had hung up his towel and retired.

It’s probably just as well he did retire — after all, who wants to live in a world without bottlenose dolphins?

There have been several spoofs, video responses and imitators, of varying degrees of cleverness and sophistication.

My favorite thus far is the version produced by the Harold B Lee Library at Brigham Young University in Utah, USA. Starring the “New Spice Guy,” it’s called Study like a scholar, scholar (found via Elizabeth Bear).

Of course, in the online world very little is actually original. Old Spice Guy had already said a few words about libraries.

Keep an eye out for Isaiah Mustafa: he’s an actor who knows he’s onto a good thing. He’s also a Batman fan who named his daughter for a character in the Spiderman comics and who is devoted to his girlfriend.

What it all meant

Two lessons.

First, this particular advertising campaign was part of a broader, long-term marketing strategy for Old Spice (see the Fast Company article mentioned above). Proctor and Gamble have spent most of this decade looking for ways to improve Old Spice sales.

The longer-term campaign was already having some effect — Forbes magazine reported that a Chicago market research firm had found Old Spice body wash sales were up 16.7 per cent in the year ending 13 June 2010. It remains to be seen whether the July 2010 hype makes a difference to their overall sales figures.

Second, don’t be fooled by the ‘social media’ element. This was no Cluetrain Manifesto “markets are conversations” concept put into action. Rather, it was an old-fashioned broadcast advertising campaign. Proctor and Gamble had a product to sell, and their advertising agency set about creating a market demand for that product. Interaction between individual customers (or potential customers) and the manufacturer was non-existent.

Individuals did interact with the advertising agency, but it was within strictly defined terms: the individuals blogged, tweeted or otherwise wrote about the advertisements. These blogs, tweets etc were published to the world at large. The ad agency selected a tiny proportion of these messages for a personalised response. The consumers had no input about product design, contents or production; the company learned nothing about the factors that influence a person’s choice of bodywash.

Marina Gorbis has a different idea. In a short article for the Institute for the Future (of which she is executive director) she proposes a different type of business model for social-media ventures:

“Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social. They take advantage of intrinsic human motivations to contribute in order to be noticed, to share opinions, to be a part of something greater than ourselves… Our business models, by contrast, are based primarily on monetary rewards. They are mostly hierarchical and non-participatory decisionmaking processes…

“If we are to truly fulfill the promise of technology tools we have created, we urgently need to design new governance models and new ways of creating value. In the least, organizations whose value derives from communities they create should incorporate the governance principles of successful commons organizations and use the same technology platforms that are at the core of their operations for governance purposes.”

Sounds familiar? David Weinberger wrote in 1999 about the World Wide Web’s effect on organisations. He predicted that companies would survive by becoming ‘hyperlinked’ organisations where hierarchies are replaced by networks of equals:

“…the Web crept into our offices under false pretenses. We thought first it was a library of information. Then we thought it was a publishing medium. Then we thought it was a toy or a dangerous distraction. But in fact it is a conversation of a new type… Conversation that understands that it isn’t a distraction from work, it’s the real work of business.

“The Web is hitting business with the force of a whirlwind because it is a whirlwind. The closely held, tightly packed, beautifully tooled pieces are being pulled apart. They are rebinding themselves in patterns determined by the conversations that are occurring in every conceivable tone of voice.

“The character of business is becoming the same as the character of the Web — an explosion reconfigured by the intersection of hearts.” (The Cluetrain Manifesto, chapter 5)

The Little, Brown paperback edition of Iain M Banks’s latest novel, Transition, comes with a unique barcode. Scan the barcode with your iPhone and it will download companion features for the novel — unseen chapters, author’s notes and commentary, and an annotated list of characters.

Rival publisher Canongate:

“… is no slouch in the digital department itself, … launching a (paid-for) enhanced iPhone app for Nick Cave’s novel The Death of Bunny Munro … complete with videos of Cave and an audio version synched to the text of the book, scored by Cave himself.”

Smart business.

Infographic showing relative proportions of printed and digital materials lent by US libraries. Data source: ALA. Infographic published in the Wall Street Journal (click image for full article)

Libraries, too, are embracing e-books. Led by the Internet Archive  a group of US lending libraries have set up OpenLibrary.org, a web site for borrowing e-books.

Geoffrey Fowler writes in the Wall Street Journal that the OpenLibrary catalogue includes access to “more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles available at many public libraries.”

The digital collection will include scans of out-of-print books that can still be found on library shelves. Each title can be borrowed by only one person at a time; if the e-book version is checked out, then the corresponding printed edition will not be available for loan.