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.
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.
Massively successful move on their part.
Massively.
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?
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.