You only get to be first once, of course.

By now you’ve see these Old Spice YouTube videos.  They are hilarious, Saturday Night Live skit-worthy comedy in 30 second spots put up in real time on YouTube in response to Tweets.  To promote Old Spice!!

The agency producing them, Wieden+Kennedy, has been shooting nearly 100 of these a day, and everyone is talking about them.  Google’s CFO just mentioned the ads on an earnings call, calling it “a glimpse of where the world is going.”

(Full backstory here, including 6 of the videos.)

You can’t plan for this kind of thing.  It’s not like the folks at Wieden+Kennedy and the team at P&G said, as they were doing the TV commercials: “So if these things are wildly popular and they start exploding through social media, should we be ready to film 100 mini-commercials a day and throw them up on YouTube, without approval from all the people whose job it is to say no to this kind of thing?”

No, that’s not what happened.

What happened is that they created a system that was designed to move and to say yes, built on trust.  The people whose job it was to dumb it down and mediocre it out either spoke their peace early on or got out of the way.

So they come in first.