Choose your own adventure books. The very phrase brings a flood of nostalgia over me and brings me back to an era where I'd be sat in bed as a kid, flicking through a Goosebumps book to page 124, only to find out I'd died horribly in some kind of brutal way.
It's something of a dead formula, with only very recent attempts in videogaming by the likes of Telltale Games with their Walking Dead and Game of Thrones games harking back to it. However, the latest Old Spice Instagram campaign is delightfully nostalgic to those who remember how it worked.
Yep, it's a choose your own adventure story. But it's run through Instagram.
How does the Old Spice Instagram campaign work?
It's a flash of simple genius really. Old Spice posted their first image in the series on Instagram a few days ago, showing a man who's awoken in a cave next to a bottle of Old Spice. The post details the scenario, and invites users to play by simply tapping on the image. This brings up two options in the form of other accounts that Old Spice have bookmarked.
You choose an option, and are brought to that profile, which has the next image in the story for you to view. Occasionally, you'll run into a dead end, at which point they'll invite you to go back a step.
The ending is genuinely amusing. At this point it's been liked by 353 people, received 80 comments, and has no doubt been viewed by countless others, showing loads of people have gone all the way through to the end. A genuinely brilliant little campaign by the social media team, and an amazing case of gamifying a platform in a unique way. Bravo.
You can start the adventure here:
