

How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter - caffeinewriter
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/02/oreo-twitter-super-bowl/

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venus
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
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.

~~~
sparky
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.

~~~
netrus
In Germany we have Aldi (they own Trader's Joe in the US), they only sell no
name products, and I honestly belive food cannot be sold/produced any cheaper.

The two founders used to be the richest Germans for decades.

~~~
sparky
Good point! I'm in the midwest, and we have a few Aldi stores here too.
There's definitely a distinction between opting out of packaged food (making
things from scratch, eating more fruits/vegetables, ..) and opting out of the
marketing-driven frenzy of brand name food. The latter can definitely save you
money.

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chaz
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
> 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.

~~~
criley
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?

~~~
elliottcarlson
Is that question really necessary? While the question is not directed at me, I
AM ignorant to American football. Not everyone is familiar with the way
American football is played, especially those from other countries. Your
description does shed a new light on it - but I still don't care for it.

~~~
criley
Apologies, the normal trope on the internet is to be stupidly ignorant about
American football as an excuse to insult it. "Lol handegg rules are so
strange! Who would have thought Americans would like watching people stand
about for hours!"

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mmanfrin
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.

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pm90
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

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

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

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

~~~
zecho
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.

------
tsumnia
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
Tweeted during the blackout:
<https://twitter.com/BWWings/status/298245437373177856>

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

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

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modarts
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.

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keammo1
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.

~~~
radley
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.

~~~
keammo1
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.

~~~
sophacles
Basically, it got them a lot of recognition for fast ad turn around time, on
black swan event. No one expected the power to go out at the game. Heck,
Entergy (the utility) didn't expect anything like that to happen. Everyone
expects event appropriate ads for the easy to predict or contingency stuff
(e.g. post game ads for appropriate for each team's win, even post game ads
differentiating between blowout and close conditions for each team) - we all
know that those are all ready to go. But a decent add responding to the
unpredictable, _in a timely way_ opens a lot of new possibilities. This ad
would be downright stupid if it happened after the fact. Further, the later
into the event it happens, the lower the amusing aspect of it is to people. In
situations like this, the timing is everything. You know that "oh it would
have been funny to say $witty_comment" feeling? Advertisers get it too.

So the big deal is oreo just showed the general public that you can have big
corporate response to real-time events (for smaller step sizes than before),
in a way that the public just didn't think possible.

It's Tuesday morning, and I'm still talking about a superbowl ad. This doesn't
happen. I've never discussed a super bowl ad any later than monday evening
happy hour, no matter how good. I've written and said and read the word oreo
more times in the last day than I had in the month prior. Even assuming they
paid 15 people overtime, I'm pretty sure the cost of this compared to the
amount of airtime they get over this beats the cost/coverage numbers for
almost any other superbowl ad. So, how is it not a win for oreo?

~~~
radley
Oreo.

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sliverstorm
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
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.

