Nature Adventure
- Brand
- Old Spice
- Year
- 2015
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Fashion & Beauty
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Social
- Agency
- Twitch.tv
- With
- PrettyBird
- With
- Fourclops
- With
- Wieden + Kennedy
Objective
Old Spice needed to sell its new Fresher Collection to young men who tune out ads but live on Twitch. Instead of buying a spot, the brand put itself inside the exact collective-control ritual the audience already loved from Twitch Plays Pokémon — and gave Twitch its first-ever branded experience of that kind.
Solution
Viewers open the Old Spice channel and see a live shoulder-cam feed of a man alone in the woods, with a normal Twitch chat window beside it — no install, no sign-up. To play, you type a command for what "Nature Man" should do next, like massaging an antelope or building a sundial out of cookies; thousands of commands pour in at once, and only when the crowd converges on one action does he actually do it and the story moves forward. Following the chat's lead, he stumbles through scripted encounters — a bear, a talking tree, a fistfight with a prospector, a courtship with a forest sprite — while a voiceover cracks jokes in classic Old Spice deadpan. Chatting also unlocks exclusive Old Spice emotes to spam alongside your commands. The broadcast ran continuously for three days, so a session ends whenever you stop watching — the story just keeps unfolding for the next wave of viewers.
Results
2.65 million total views and 702,920 unique viewers over the three-day broadcast, peaking at roughly 88,000 unique viewers per hour. 1.4 million people posted in chat, with the top commenter alone sending 1,900 messages, and the exclusive Old Spice emotes were used more than 105,000 times. Combined, viewers watched an estimated 29 years of footage.
- 1
The player opens twitch.tv/oldspice (or the oldspicenatureadventure.com promo site) to a live video feed shot from a shoulder-mounted camera on a real person, Nature Man, wandering the woods, with a standard Twitch chat window beside it. There is no sign-up or install: playing means typing in that chat.
- 2
Players type commands for Nature Man to perform, from massaging an antelope to eating unfamiliar berries. A single message decides nothing — thousands arrive per minute, and the chat has to converge on one shared command before Nature Man acts on it.
- 3
Collective commands unlock the next activity or achievement in a fixed sequence, so the campaign plays as a chain of scenes being opened up rather than a free-roam walk through the forest.
- 4
The core story beats are staged encounters the chat pushes Nature Man through in order: an arm-wrestle or fight with a bear (a person in costume), a riddle from a talking tree that the chat must answer together, a no-rules food fight against a hostile prospector, and a courtship of a forest fairy that closes out the main plot.
- 5
Between story beats, players run into random NPCs and forest gags, such as a beaver, which are released as separate side clips (NPC Encounters) alongside the main story.
- 6
A voiceover narrates the action throughout in the style of Old Spice's "Look At Your Man" ads, replaying each executed command back as an ad-style bit.
- 7
Beyond typed commands, players can use exclusive Old Spice emotes available in the channel's chat, a second, brand-marked way to take part.
- 8
The stream runs continuously for three days, from 10am Pacific on Thursday, April 16 through April 18, 2015, and players can join at any moment to fall in with whatever the chat is doing right then.
- 9
Once the broadcast ends, the game itself can no longer be played — only raw day-by-day stream footage and YouTube highlight clips remain.
