How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/02/oreo-twitter-super-bowl/

by caffeinewriter • 13 years ago

91 55 13 years ago

pm90• 13 years ago

Hmm, I first thought that it was the work of a brilliant marketer at Oreo; but this is even better. They had prepared for it and reaped the rewards.

no_more_death• 13 years ago

Yes, this is really a great example of how most things that we attribute to brilliance are due more to preparation and foresight.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

Considering they were running a TV commercial (involving a comic fight in a library over the 'best' part of an Oreo cookie) in a time slot that sells for >$1m, having a social media team standing by to monitor and possibly curate reaction to the advert just seems like common sense. If you manage a major brand and you don't have someone whose primary job is to keep an eye on how that brand is discussed on the internet, then you're not looking after the interests of your employers.

zecho2• 13 years ago

MLB had a good tweet during the blackout: https://twitter.com/MLB/status/298247417462140928

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

Can you explain what's so good about it? Is it just a reminder that they start playing baseball soon, or is there some joke there?

jfernandez• 13 years ago

I think it's just a light jab at the blackout situation with the "this brief pause" bit

torbit• 13 years ago

I don't get it. Is it some baseball joke? I don't watch it.

mfringel• 13 years ago

Well, given that it's from the official account of Major League Baseball, that seems like a likely conclusion.

zecho2• 13 years ago

Spring training begins in a few days. It was a light jab at the NFL--in the middle of the power outage--that the MLB season is starting soon.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Can someone explain- is there actually a joke in that ad, aside from "haha the power went out"? Are they doing anything particularly clever, aside from showing that they are really on top of things?

scottkrager• 13 years ago

I think it was mostly viral due to the speed at which the ad was placed. I think it was something around just a few minutes, which for a major brand, is insanely impressive.

ianstormtaylor• 13 years ago

If it had been basketball instead of football it would have really good.

untog• 13 years ago

I looked once the game had come back up- the tweet had been retweeted around 6,000 times. That's not actually that successful- it seems like the media are talking about it a lot more than people are.

stephengillie• 13 years ago

That's part of their promotional strategy - talk about why nobody's talking about it.

chaz6• 13 years ago

Earned media is a part of any successful marketing strategy.

venus• 13 years ago

Remember the posts on HN a few days ago how we're all just as poor and working even harder as we were 50 years ago? This is why.

Scramble to make the money to buy the food whose shelf cost is 90% marketing and 5% the cheapest, crappiest ingredients available. Or buy the washing powder that's 90% marketing and all made in the same factory anyway and the only difference is the self selected demographic targeting. Or #name_whatever_product_you_like.

> they had a 15-person social media team at the ready to respond to whatever happened online in response to the Super Bowl

This is what our society spends its money on. A crack team of Oreos marketers. Words fail me.

graeme• 13 years ago

Good point. Fortunately, it's easy enough for individuals to opt out. And there seems to be a trend in urban cores towards this.

If you opt out of pacakaged foods and car ownership, you have a lot of surplus money to spend on whatever you want, or save. Ditto for owning a large house, or an oversized apartment.

Edit: to be clear, I didn't mean money is the purpose of opting out of these things. But it's certainly a significant side effect.

How can you afford grass fed beef? With the money you save not paying for oreo's marketing budget.

sparky2• 13 years ago

It's certainly possible to opt out of packaged foods as a way of saving money, but I don't think I know anybody who's done so. I'd go so far as to say most people do it to eat tastier, healthier, and/or more ideologically pleasing food, and usually spend more than they would on a diet of Hot Pockets or Taco Bell.

SoftwareMaven• 13 years ago

I wish I could save money opting out of crap food. Instead, I'm in the process of investing big-time. I likely won't see a dime back, but hopefully me, my wife and kids will all be healthier (which could conceivably pay dividends, but causality will be impossible to prove).

The sad reality is the corn[1] and wheat that makes up the majority of things in boxes is disgustingly cheap. I went to the grocery store tonight and avoided the middle aisles where the boxes of corn-crap live, and spent about 40% more than the old normal.

1. A gigantic lightbulb went of for me when I heard the following, "Farmers have known for hundreds of years the best way to fatten a cow up before butchering it is to give it corn." Now try to find some food item that doesn't contain some corn product. They even put the damn stuff in meat.

meric• 13 years ago

>> Remember the posts on HN a few days ago how we're all just as poor and working even harder as we were 50 years ago? This is why.

That would definitely be something I would like to read about, but looks like I've missed them. I've been going through the news page but can't seem to find it. Care to share a few links from your saved stories list? Many thanks.

crindy• 13 years ago

I think this is it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5161941

confluence• 13 years ago

I call it buying air. Most products are commodity and, more often than not, effectively identical. The only way such companies can survive is through the use of psychological arbitrage.

radley4• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure advertisers feel the same way (but opposite) about writing code for a living...

mmanfrin• 13 years ago

Did that article just reference a comment on Digg's Tumblr?

I feel like I am through the looking glass. Magazine cites one social media website has-been's new social-media website's page.

tsumnia• 13 years ago

I'd love to see more reactions to the blackout. When I was waiting for the game to continue, I instantly remembered all the Buffalo Wild Wing 'Overtime' commercials.

If this is how Oreo's marketing team reacted, you can imagine there was someone at BWW corporate working on acquiring the blackout's footage today.

johns• 13 years ago

Tweeted during the blackout: https://twitter.com/BWWings/status/298245437373177856

keammo12• 13 years ago

How is this "winning" the Marketing Super Bowl? How many people saw this? A few hundred thousand at best? 108 million people were watching the Super Bowl. A Tweet does basically nothing for Oreo's brand when compared to an actual Super Bowl ad.

chaz6• 13 years ago

The title is admittedly overcooked. But Super Bowl commercials cost $4mm but the tweet was free ...

sdoering• 13 years ago

The tweet was 15 persons on standby, a strategy that assembled such a team much earlier, and possibly a lot of money for so called social media experts even earlier.

So you call this tweet free? No, if you ever bought an cookie from them in the last (lets say) three years, you payed for that tweet.

sorry, don't wanna sound rude, but knowing the cost (in terms of consultants, human resources, et al) of advertising, marketing and the like, free seems to be such a wrong term to me.

radley4• 13 years ago

What!?!?

Oreo spent $xM on a superbowl commercial which everybody saw and promptly forgot when the blond / old people / puppy came on next.

That dumb small tweet was a historical event. I kid you not, it will be studied by pros for the next decade. It just defined a whole new market.

keammo12• 13 years ago

The pros can study it all they want. Best case scenario, the Tweeted image probably had 0.5% reach of their Super Bowl ad, in a completely unproven medium for brand marketing. Outside of some niche groups interested in advertising, the Tweet will be forgotten just quickly as the TV spot. EDIT: maybe a win for 360i, who will no doubt garner a lot of interest here. I just don't see what this does for Oreo though.

maaaats• 13 years ago

I haven't seen any of the ads and not the game (not American), but the Oreo tweet has reached far beyond USA.

chaz6• 13 years ago

Let me offer a counterpoint to HN's cynicism. I watched the Super Bowl with tweets streaming through, it was fun and engaging to see reactions and wit to everything from plays, Beyonce, and commercials -- within seconds. If I scroll through now, it's like retelling a joke when the timing is completely off, and shrugging it off as, "well, you had to be there." It doesn't diminish the experience at the time, but it's hard to it relate now.

This isn't the first time for me that Twitter really added to a lengthy real-time event. I fired up my Tweetbot for both Hurricane Sandy and Election 2012. It depends on who you follow, but for me, it made for a much more entertaining night than just watching the CNN talking heads.

As for the value that these brands got, it's hard to say. We're still in the early stages of brands + social, and Oreo can't possibly account for an extra box of cookies sold with any level of confidence. But I do know that I enjoyed seeing Audi, Tide, and Walgreens get retweeted more than I saw my SF friends swearing at the 49ers for the 100th time.

Swizec• 13 years ago

> Twitter really added to a lengthy real-time event

But a sporting event shouldn't feel like a lengthy real-time event imho. When I'm watching a good boxing match looking at anything but the screen is the last thing on my mind.

Now american football on the other hand ... 4 hours for 11 minutes of gameplay. I just don't get it.

jebeng• 13 years ago

Watch them online at NFL game pass and it's around 2 hours per game commercial free, or edited and condensed down to around 1 hour. It is awesome.

criley2• 13 years ago

Maybe that's because boxing doesn't stop a lot and is meant to be played in a short period of time while American football is more a military game of attrition with tons of breaks between skirmishes.

Or are you just being willfully ignorant about this?

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

Yeah completely nuts. Now, Cricket! Stasis for 24 hours, punctuated by - a guy trotting across the field! Wow!

And horse racing - that's a sport, man. Nothing for half an hour, then a whole minute of horses running across a field a quarter mile away. Oh, the humanity.

Don't get me started on track and field. They are a gut-busting good time. All those people milling around for hours, then somebody hops over a pole! I can't tell you how riveting.

Yeah, American football is in great company the world 'round.

chaz6• 13 years ago

I don't like the amount of clock management that's in football or basketball. Baseball can drag on forever with all of the pitching changes, and is best watched with something else to do. But when getting together with friends to watch an event, 2-3 hours is about right.

chucknelson• 13 years ago

> I fired up my Tweetbot for both Hurricane Sandy and Election 2012. It depends on who you follow, but for me, it made for a much more entertaining night than just watching the CNN talking heads.

Tragedies like Hurricane Sandy, all about the "entertainment"...

masklinn2• 13 years ago

Talk about a debatable choice of words…

eqreqeq• 13 years ago

Just like a car crash. Or why do you think people slow down?

modarts• 13 years ago

Still suffering a pretty crippling depression from that loss, was hoping to at least escape it with sticking with HN and other of my non-sports related content sources.

revbuddylove• 13 years ago

It's cute, and I bet it helped sell exactly zero oreos. Marketers patting marketers on the back, w00t!

radley4• 13 years ago

There's also Audi's great quip tweet about Mercedes-Benz not paying the lighting bill.

Audi got similarly beat by a quip a few years ago:

http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/04/13/billboards-war-bmw-vs-audi...

How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter

Related Stories