8 ms·

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

91 points by caffeinewriter 14y ago

pm90 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
zecho 14y ago
MLB had a good tweet during the blackout: https://twitter.com/MLB/status/298247417462140928 https://twitter.com/MLB/status/298247417462140928
- MichaelGG 14y 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 14y ago
    I think it's just a light jab at the blackout situation with the "this brief pause" bit
    - caffeinewriter 14y ago
      People frequently dunk Oreo cookies in milk, thus leading to the "dunk in the dark" ad.
- torbit 14y ago
  I don't get it. Is it some baseball joke? I don't watch it.
  - mfringel 14y ago
    Well, given that it's from the official account of Major League Baseball, that seems like a likely conclusion.
  - zecho 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  If it had been basketball instead of football it would have really good.
untog 14y 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 14y ago
  That's part of their promotional strategy - talk about why nobody's talking about it.
- chaz 14y ago
  Earned media is a part of any successful marketing strategy.
venus 14y 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 14y 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.
  - sparky 14y 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.
    - netrus 14y ago
      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.
      - 14y ago
mmanfrin 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  Tweeted during the blackout: https://twitter.com/BWWings/status/298245437373177856 https://twitter.com/BWWings/status/298245437373177856
keammo1 14y 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.
- chaz 14y ago
  The title is admittedly overcooked. But Super Bowl commercials cost $4mm but the tweet was free ...
  - sdoering 14y 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.
    - chaz 14y ago
      I won't argue that it cost them precisely $0. But the marginal cost of this tweet was pretty close to free. Let's be realistic -- there's no way they had 15 FTEs fully dedicated to social media. Instead, it's 15 people from Customer Service, and/or Marketing, who are already employed at the company. When the company spends $4mm on an ad, it likely turns into a Super Bowl party at the office, with free pizza and beer in the biggest conference room in the building. The 15 get a bit of training and access to Hootsuite, which is what @Oreo is using, and asked to stand by with their notebooks if things got crazy. At a previous job, when we had a big marketing event like this, it was all hands on deck, and everyone, no matter what your normal job function, was to answer phones. Our 40-person Customer Service team was actually 2 Customer Service people, augmented by the CEO, all VPs, marketers, sales, etc.
- radley 14y 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.
chaz 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
  - criley 14y 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?
    - elliottcarlson 14y ago
modarts 14y 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 14y ago
It's cute, and I bet it helped sell exactly zero oreos. Marketers patting marketers on the back, w00t!
radley 14y 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/ http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/04/13/billboards-war-bmw-vs-audi...

pm90 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

zecho 14y ago

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

MichaelGG 14y 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 14y ago
  I think it's just a light jab at the blackout situation with the "this brief pause" bit
  - caffeinewriter 14y ago
    People frequently dunk Oreo cookies in milk, thus leading to the "dunk in the dark" ad.
torbit 14y ago
I don't get it. Is it some baseball joke? I don't watch it.
- mfringel 14y ago
  Well, given that it's from the official account of Major League Baseball, that seems like a likely conclusion.
- zecho 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
If it had been basketball instead of football it would have really good.

untog 14y 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 14y ago
That's part of their promotional strategy - talk about why nobody's talking about it.
chaz 14y ago
Earned media is a part of any successful marketing strategy.

venus 14y 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 14y 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.
- sparky 14y 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.
  - netrus 14y ago
    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.
    - 14y ago

mmanfrin 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
Tweeted during the blackout: https://twitter.com/BWWings/status/298245437373177856 https://twitter.com/BWWings/status/298245437373177856

keammo1 14y 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.

chaz 14y ago
The title is admittedly overcooked. But Super Bowl commercials cost $4mm but the tweet was free ...
- sdoering 14y 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.
  - chaz 14y ago
    I won't argue that it cost them precisely $0. But the marginal cost of this tweet was pretty close to free. Let's be realistic -- there's no way they had 15 FTEs fully dedicated to social media. Instead, it's 15 people from Customer Service, and/or Marketing, who are already employed at the company. When the company spends $4mm on an ad, it likely turns into a Super Bowl party at the office, with free pizza and beer in the biggest conference room in the building. The 15 get a bit of training and access to Hootsuite, which is what @Oreo is using, and asked to stand by with their notebooks if things got crazy. At a previous job, when we had a big marketing event like this, it was all hands on deck, and everyone, no matter what your normal job function, was to answer phones. Our 40-person Customer Service team was actually 2 Customer Service people, augmented by the CEO, all VPs, marketers, sales, etc.
radley 14y 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.

chaz 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- criley 14y 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?
  - elliottcarlson 14y ago

modarts 14y 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 14y ago

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

radley 14y 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/ http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/04/13/billboards-war-bmw-vs-audi...