It doesn’t happen very often but I’m going to claim them. At least for a day!
On February 5th, 2013, just after the Super Bowl, in a blog post on this site, I stated that Oreo Cookies was the best and most prepared advertiser. Because of their brilliant tweet, “you can still dunk in the dark” they sent out when the Super Dome lost power for 34 minutes I predicted they had an empowered team in place to react to any event.
I was right.
Here is a copy of an article linked from Business Insider.
Oreo’s Super Bowl Power-Outage Tweet Was 18 Months In The Making
Jim Edwards | Mar. 12, 2013, 8:34 AM | 2,023 | 2
Oreo / Mondelez
The tweet heard round the world when the power went out at the Super Bowl this year — Oreo’s “Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark” — was a year and a half in planning, Mondelēz svp Lisa Mann told the 4A’s conference.
The brand began planning almost two years ago, Ad Exchanger reports, as Oreo approached its 100th birthday. The company decided that it would do something in social media every day rather than just occasionally:
The company eventually set up a war room to figure out what was meaningful to its followers — who include some 32 million individuals on Facebook and about 80,000 on Twitter.
One of its early successes was the gay pride Oreo Facebook post from June last year.
So when the lights went out at the New Orleans Super Dome during the Ravens v. 49ers game, Oreo had a well-oiled machine in place that was used to interacting live in social media every day.
The tweet was retweeted more than 16,000 times, and became one of the more memorable ad moments of the game.
Plus, of course, the company had bought a Super Bowl ad of its own, and was thus expecting a wave of tweets based on it.
One element of good marketing is being able to react quickly when needed. Oreo was ready. I wonder where all the others were? In the dark I guess.
Excuse me I have to go get a glass of milk to celebrate!
Wondering Around 