Having a Little Fun with Official Social Media: Old Spice And @EPAgov

Are you familiar with last year’s Old Spice ad campaign? They featured a formed NFL player and were hilarious. Here’s one of my favorites for context:

The true social media genius, though, was that they invited people to tweet requests to him, and then they shot short video responses. In each one, he reads the full tweet and then responds in the same over-the-top macho way, to humorous effect. For example (she said yes, by the way):

This summer, the gimmick was that romance novel cover model Fabio was challenging “Old Old Spice Guy” to the right to represent Old Spice. And again, they invited people to write to them.

So Ryan Chauvin, our facetweeter, suggested we tweet from EPA’s main account and promote Pick 5 for the Environment, our program challenging people to commit to at least 5 actions to protect our planet:

Dear @Oldspice guy

Fabio responded! Sort of. As the end of the campaign, the two guys started messing with each other. But at least Fabio read our tweet aloud:

We didn’t really expect him to respond seriously; we were just hoping to get our tweet read and maybe get a few folks to check out our twitter account. And 50,000 people have seen that video so far. 🙂

Now we’re wondering – how could we do something like this campaign (as asked by probably thousands of ad execs nationwide)?