Gillette has been building buzz the last month with how-to online
videos. The videos show men how to shave everywhere except their face,
also known as “manscaping.”

There has been tons buzz around the videos. By last Friday, Gillette’s Youtube site had more than 300,000 views in about a month.

The videos are very clever and humorous, which is different from the
approach they usually take in their advertising and marketing. Each
light-hearted video shows a cartoon demonstrating how to manscape
different areas of the body.

Before the videos were posted, Gillette tested them on both men and
women with little negative feedback. Through their research, Gillette
also found that one-third of men shave hair from their body other than
their faces.

“Our goal was to engage guys in a dialogue on the whys and how-to’s, and to do it comfortably and reassure them in a funny and entertaining way,” said Tim Williams a Gillette marketing official.

I think Gillette did a really great job with these videos. Not only are
they funny and perfect to reach 20-something men, but there is actually
research to back their approach.

Although we can’t leave without saying that they are ripping off the Phillips Norelco Shave Everywhere site from a few years ago.

The real Slim Shady is back. We almost forgot all about Eminem and all his drama but now he’s releasing his first album in the last five years, “The Relapse.”

We all knew it would happen eventually but I wasn’t expecting Eminem to build buzz so well.  The marketing team at Aftermath/Interscope Records has created a cool campaign to reintroduce the hip-hop star. You can read about the full campaign here. It’s cool to see that Eminem is marketing his album the same way big studios market new movie releases.

So far, the campaign is working. Twitter has been their main online outlet so far and within the last couple days Tweeters have been going crazy for the new campaign. There has also been a major spike in Eminem Google searches, comparable to the Google inquiries for his 2004 album.

Here are the official stats so far:

“According to Compete, Eminem.com reached 113,868 unique visitors during April, while the most popular of his tweets — which linked to Therelapse.com on May 7 — reached at least 41,704 people within just one week, according to an analysis of data provided to Ad Age by Tweetreach.”

Not too shabby.

Going back to the Google trends, the spike at the very end of the graph is a result of the ticket giveaway for his Detroit show. So far, this has been the only giveaway in the campaign, which surprises me. That could be because I just read an article about how successful Radiohead’s name-your-own-price promotion was in 2007. Eminem’s market are those who are most likely to pirate music. The album has already been leaked online, so it would have made sense for Eminem to make his campaign cater to that audience. Considering the success of his past albums, doing something similar to Radiohead would have definitely been doable.

But you know what? I’m just glad Eminem is back and well, despite his stint with prescription drug abuse. And we’re glad to see him harnessing the power of social media.