Now that watching sports is a two-screen – if not three-screen – experience, advertisers have to do more than just run commercials to get fans’ attention. They have to stay on their toes on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels to stay relevant – and during Sunday night’s Super Bowl, no brand pulled off more fancy footwork than Oreo.
During the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII when a power outage at the Superdome caused some of the lights to go out for 34 minutes, the sandwich cookie’s social media team jumped on the cultural moment, tweeting an ad that read “Power Out? No problem” with a starkly-lit image of a solitary Oreo and the caption, “You can still dunk in the dark.” The message caught on almost immediately, getting nearly 15,000 retweets (as of this writing) and more than 20,000 likes on Facebook – not quite Beyoncé halftime show numbers, but pretty impressive for a one-off joke made by a cookie. The ad was also posted on Tumblr by digg, with the note “Oreo won the Super Bowl blackout.”
So how did Oreo but their own twist on the lights-out scenario so quickly? Turns out they had a 15-person social media team at the ready to respond to whatever happened online in response to the Super Bowl — whether it was a mind-blowing play or half the lights shutting off. So not only did they have a regular commercial run during the first quarter, they also had copywriters, a strategist, and artists ready to react to any situation in 10 minutes or less.
“The new world order of communications today incorporates the whole of the way people are interacting with brands right now,” Sarah Hofstetter, president of digital marketing agency 360i, which handled game-day tweeting for Oreo, said in an interview with Wired. “Once the blackout happened, no one was distracted — there was nothing going on. The combination of speed and cultural relevance propelled it the forefront.”
The social media team also did some planning ahead; for example, they had two different versions of the victory tweet, one with the colors of the San Francisco 49ers and one with the colors of the (now-victorious) Baltimore Ravens. According to a spokeswoman for Oreo’s parent company Mondelēz, it’s still too early to determine what effect the ad may have on sales, but Hofstetter notes that even almost 24 hours after the game, “if you search ‘Oreo’ on Twitter right now, it doesn’t stop rolling. It is absolutely amazing.”
In an environment where advertisers are spending nearly $4 million to run a spot during the Big Game, having a brand respond in real-time on social media is a clever way to reach people on smartphones and computers — particularly when a survey prior to the game found that about 36 percent of Super Bowl viewers would be consulting a second screen.
This sort of real-time response offers brands far more agility to respond in the moment than traditional advertising, and while this kind of social media campaign isn’t entirely new, it’s “not as popular as it should be,” said Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger, the author of the upcoming book Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
“The Super Bowl channel is very saturated,” Berger said in an interview with Wired. “I think a retweet is much more engaged, it is suggesting that the audience is not only processing this message but actively engaging with the message and selecting the message to pass on to their friends. That said, is this going to sell more Oreos at the end of the day? Hard to tell. [But] It definitely makes the brand seem like a more clever, more interesting, sharp brand. So in terms of brand equity this is as effective, if not more effective, than just showing another Super Bowl ad.”
In other words, touchdown: Oreo.
How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter
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How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter
