• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 16, 2010

Just seconds before the self-satirizing Old Spice "Man on a Horse" character wore out his welcome, the hyper-manly bastard crushed it this week with a brilliant combination of social media and video. Agency Weiden + Kennedy produced scores of videos of actor Isaiah Mustafa responding in near-real-time to questions posed on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. According to a full run down of the project at ReadWriteWeb, the actor and a crew from the agency invited high profile members of various social nets to pose questions to the Old Spice persona. Holed up in a studio for a couple of days, they then made short clips in response to queries coming apparently from everyone from Christina Applegate to Alyssa Milano, Demi Moore to the crowds at Reddit.

According to ReadWriteWeb a team of videographers and creatives are working in concert with technical staff to determine which Tweets have the combination of social influence and content potential to merit a filmed response. The report quotes Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director: "We're looking at who's written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we're editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web...in real time."

Early Thursday the project came to an end with an over-the-top sign off video.

The effect is simply brilliant. They have succeeded in blending social media, video and sheer creative inspiration into a campaign that looks like nothing that came before. This has become an ongoing social media/video event that just expands its reach every second. Weiden + Kennedy have tons of video assets to leverage across a host of media now. The character has new life, even if the one-joke premise has got to fray pretty soon.

The videos are hit or miss, but the project was so addictive you just kept coming back to see if the next one was a hit. The Demi Moore clip, in which our hero trashes a pirate piñata is noteworthy. Alyssa Milano herself grabbed a towel and took her vidcam into the bathroom to vid-banter with him.

This is media you can't buy.