And Oreo racked up the retweets and favorites for its fast work.
Other brands that jumped on the blackout bandwagon: Audi; Walgreens, which drily reminded consumers it carries candles and lights; PBS, which suggested, "This might be a good time to think about alternative programming," hashtagged #SuperbowlBlackout #WeHaveDowntonPBS; the SimCity game, which has a new version coming out soon; and more.
SearchEngineLand's Matt McGee labeled the stunts as "newsjacking," inserting your brand or idea into breaking news events.
Newsjacking has been going on for a very long time in the IT industry, and most of it is clumsy. In its dumbest form, it involves disaster recovery technology jumping on the latest hurricane or earthquake to point out that their products could have prevented the data loss. Because these sorts of natural disasters usually involve people dying, that kind of newsjacking is in exquisitely poor taste, like trying to sell life insurance at a funeral.
The Super Bowl blackout brandjacking, on the other hand, is smart, funny, effective, and good work all around.
But will it result in improved sales? That's the problem with brand advertising; it's often difficult to tell. Generally speaking, you look for a sales bump after the big TV commercial or Twitter campaign, and assume cause-and-effect.
Brands didn't just post tweets, they also spent money pushing those tweets out to consumers by purchasing promoted tweets from Twitter.
AdAge notes:
The Oreo graphic was "designed, captioned and approved within minutes," according to Sarah Hofstetter, president of the cookie brand's digital agency of record, Dentsu-owned 360i. All the decisions were made in real time quickly because marketers and agency members were sitting together at a "mission control" center, or a social-media war room of sorts, at the agency's headquarters in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan. Among those who were there were two brand team members from Oreo, and nearly a dozen creatives, strategists, community managers, and social-media listeners.
The agency acknowledged that it was able to make decisions so quickly because the Mondelez-owned cookie brand was a broadcaster advertiser in the Super Bowl, and so was closely monitoring chatter and interaction with consumers on all social media channels. It's arguable though, that 360i's simple little execution overshadowed Oreo's far more expensive TV ad, filled with stunts, that ran in the game before the blackout.
Social media in general was big at the Super Bowl, notes McGee, with Twitter scoring mentions in 26 of 52 commercials (half); Facebook mentioned in only four, or 8 percent; and Google+ not mentioned at all, despite being reportedly the second-most-popular social network in the world. YouTube and Instagram also scored mentions.
I agree that over time consumers are getting smarter and as such they tend to make more informed buying decisions particularly in retail but also in the boardroom. I was working on a RFI this week that was asking me the bidder what % of the market my competitors had marketshare in! I thought is was a cheeky way for the company to do less work and still be able to make informed decisions :)
This problem goes back to the 70s, to the then-famous speecy spicy meatball commercial. People thought it was a commercial for a brand of Italian food. It was actually a commercial for Alka Seltzer.
I think that's an excellent point, Mitch... the campaign popularity might overshadow that actually marketing message -- and people forget what brand was behind it all.
The example of the "Duracell Bunny" comes to mind.. where consumers were confused and thought that the Bunny was advertising for Duracell instead of Energizer... the same sort of thing can happen with social media virality... people remember the joke, but not the underlying sponsor.
It's an indication of how important it is to have a social media operation which can respond instantly to developing situations. I think that's about empowerment.
Have there been any studies on whether or not consumers actually buy more "Oreos" (or other specific products) based on the slickness of the parent company's social media team?
I didn't rush out to buy more cookies, but maybe it kept the brand alive in my head....?
Indeed content is king. With so many options, consumers and business decision makers have to make careful use of their reading and research time. Engaging with sites or sources that insult their intelligence, are biased, or otherwise make ill use of their time can't be tolerated.
@Alison -- the content is critical. In our case, we had created a novel cartoon specific for our target audience, which was something that had never been done before but was possible now thanks to products like Flash.
Content's the hardest part -- the rest is mostly paying attention to the situations and really listening to people, understsanding that it's a two-way media.
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Brands looking to measure public opinion by reading Twitter tea leaves should take heed of a Pew Research report, which finds that Twitter sentiment is often very different from public opinion as measured by surveys.
When Michael Bepko, global online community manager for Whole Foods, describes the company's social media strategy, it sounds like herding cats -- 350 cats to be precise.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
A recent release of the popular TweetDeck app for Twitter power-users gives new life to software that had previously taken a wrong turn. Here's a quick walk-through of the new TweetDeck, to show you why it should be at the top of your Twitter toolkit.
A growing number of HR managers are suspicious of individuals who do not take part in social media and view them as anti-social in real life as well as online.
Michael Brutsch, a.k.a. Reddit's Violentacrez, is a creep who posted borderline kiddie porn to the Internet anonymously, and got fired when outed by a media outlet. It's a cautionary tale even for people who aren't jerks and predators.
Amanda Richman, president of digital at MediaVest, cites the rise of the 'empowered consumer' as one of the most significant changes in digital marketing today.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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