Old Spice Voicemail

In the summer of 2010, Old Spice was running a string of excellent viral adverts - Isaiah Mustafa, as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”, replying in real time to Tweets, Facebook and YouTube comments, and questions posted on Reddit.

One of those Reddit threads asked for the Old Spice Man to record someone’s voicemail message. Through an evening of excellent collaborative work between myself, Chriswastaken and isevenx (Nelson Abalos Jr.), oldspicevoicemail.com went up: a generator that stitched together a voicemail greeting in the over-the-top cadence of the campaign.

You picked why you were too busy to answer the phone, and how you’d return your call, and it assembled the message:

It was tweeted by @OldSpice - and then promptly fell over, flooded by requests, in under three hours. Not bad for an evening’s work. It received positive feedback from the advertising company behind the campaign, and I felt a little closer to the great Isaiah Mustafa, even if he never did reply to me directly in a video.

The site is long gone now, but the screenshot above shows what it looked like.

Credits: idea by Chriswastaken, code by me, design by Nelson Abalos Jr. - and many thanks to Reddit, where the whole thing started.