How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter
wired.com
wired.com
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.
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.
The sad reality is the corn[1] and wheat that makes up the majority of things in boxes is disgustingly cheap. I went to the grocery store tonight and avoided the middle aisles where the boxes of corn-crap live, and spent about 40% more than the old normal.
1. A gigantic lightbulb went of for me when I heard the following, "Farmers have known for hundreds of years the best way to fatten a cow up before butchering it is to give it corn." Now try to find some food item that doesn't contain some corn product. They even put the damn stuff in meat.
The two founders used to be the richest Germans for decades.
That would definitely be something I would like to read about, but looks like I've missed them. I've been going through the news page but can't seem to find it. Care to share a few links from your saved stories list? Many thanks.
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.
Tragedies like Hurricane Sandy, all about the "entertainment"...
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.
And horse racing - that's a sport, man. Nothing for half an hour, then a whole minute of horses running across a field a quarter mile away. Oh, the humanity.
Don't get me started on track and field. They are a gut-busting good time. All those people milling around for hours, then somebody hops over a pole! I can't tell you how riveting.
Yeah, American football is in great company the world 'round.
Or are you just being willfully ignorant about this?
I feel like I am through the looking glass. Magazine cites one social media website has-been's new social-media website's page.
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.
Audi got similarly beat by a quip a few years ago:
http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/04/13/billboards-war-bmw-vs-audi...
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.
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?
Massively successful move on their part.
Massively.
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.
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.