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.
The Oreo experience has certainly given great visibility to Oreo's social media agency. Have seen several articles about their smarts which will, without doubt, boost their business -- as it should.
That is another dimension of real-time access. Again, information puts us in a proactive mode instead of just repair or restore to current status. The smart companies will use that effectively, as you well point out.
Fascinating insight, @smkinoshita, into what goes on behind the scenes. And more evidence that, done right, social media campaigns take a whole lot more than setting up a Facebook page and Twitter ID.
We usually think about the need for 24/7 social media monitoring in case something goes wrong -- a brand attacked online, product failure, etc. Here's the opposite case: A brand using 24/7 social media monitoring to jump on an opportunity.
I expect brands will have social media teams online whenever they launch a big ad campaign. It'll become standard, if it hasn't already.
BTW, I bookmarked this spot to watch all the super bowl ads. Haven't yet, but will soon.
After reading other articles tagged in this particular article, Coke was expected to score big using social media but apparently, the website they were directing users to was down for most of the game. So you wonder what measures they went through to be prepared for this big night. As you mentioned, Oreo has set a high standard and so other brands can learn from them so that they will be prepared for the next big opportunity.
@Alison -- I don't have a lot of experience when it comes to social media 'mission control', but I was involved in one or two myself and you really do have to set up a war-room, with clever people ready to create and go in a heartbeat.
While my experience was on a much smaller scale, it did leave a lasting positive impact. The goal was awareness and after a successful social media campaign using a combination of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube the client became a localized 'expert source', gaining respect and much improved site traffic.
Mitch, I think that their overall investment in advancing their image and customer relations overall will result in some level of increased sales.
The fact that they were monitoring and prepared to act, based on their investment and consumer connection with the Super Bowl, also puts them in a distinctive category. It certainly sets a high standard! After all, that's what they say luck is - preparation for opportunity.
Kudos to the Oreo team for responding so fast -- and so well -- to the outage during the Superbowl. I wondered how on earth they came up with that Twitter campaign so quickly, given that someone had to approve it somehow! Now we know! Did similar scenarios play out for all the other brands you cite -- Walgreens, etc.? I wonder if this will become SOP for big-ticket ad campaigns, although nothing comes anywhere near to the Superbowl in terms of cost or hype.
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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.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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