The Super Bowl is known as much for it’s TV advertising as it is for the game itself. The average cost of a 30 second TV commercial during the Super Bowl this year was $4 million.
I’ll do the math for you. That’s roughly $133,333.33 per second. Seriously expensive.
The commercials themselves become a piece of Super Bowl history. Iconic ads by companies such as Apple, Pepsi, Reebok and McDonalds have generated millions of dollars in revenue and are shown yearly as fans relive the ads of Super Bowls gone by.
However, this year something very different and unexpected happened. Something that nobody in any marketing department of any company could have foreseen or planned for in any way at all.
The power at the stadium hosting the Super Bowl went out.
In the third quarter of the game, the power going into Mercedez Benz Superdome inexplicably went out, causing a 34-minute delay of the game, and not long after the stadium first went dark, this incredibly clever tweet from Oreo came out:
THAT is seriously smart and clever use of using an unusual situation for a marketing touchdown. Within minutes, the tweet was shared thousands of times, not just on Twitter but over on Facebook too. The photo was funny, timely, and clever and it didn’t take long for its appeal to spread like wildfire.
The big question everyone was asking themselves was HOW did Oreo manage to capitalize so very quickly on a situation like a blackout that nobody knew was going to happen? According to an article by BuzzFeed, the agency behind the clever ad had a mission control set up during the game, which included having Oreo executives in the room with them. With that, as soon as the blackout happened, they were able to think up and create the photo, and with the okay from the client, send it out on Twitter.
In a split-second, the tweet by Oreo became one of the most popular ones of the night, everyone was talking about not just the blackout, but about Oreo and the blackout.
Cost for the ad? Nothing.
Touchdown Oreo.
Mr. Christie, you have good Tweeters.
Photo credit: Twitter
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