Matt Bacak: 4 Strategies I Learned From Oreo’s Super Bowl Tweet

Image courtesy of samandale/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you aren’t familiar with the story of Oreo’s famous Super Bowl tweet, let me give a quick rundown of what happened.

The date was February 3, 2013. The teams were the Ravens and the 49ers. I can’t remember how the Super Bowl ended or even any of the few funny commercials that played during that time. But I do remember that the power went out and I also remember Oreo because of the genius of Oreo’s advertising company.

Oreo tweeted a simple message during the power outage, “Power out? No problem.” They also used an image with the simple message, which you can view here (see below) and the words, “You can still dunk in the dark.”

So the million dollar question is why am I still talking about Oreo in 2014?

Oreo’s tweet during the Super Bowl of 2013 is a great reminder for internet marketers about seizing opportunities and capitalizing on social media. Building your brand is no longer a long, drawn-out process that requires millions of dollars and lots of manpower. In minutes, you can have your message and your brand out there to the public, to a huge audience for consumption. All it takes is a little diligence and creativity.

Let’s dissect Oreo’s approach and see what they did right:

They responded quickly. By responding to the power outage while it was happening, they became a current event, instead of past news.

They kept it short. Keeping the message super short made it super easy to share and retweet. This caused their message to keep expanding in Twitter to more and more people.

They included an image. Images are powerful tools all marketers should be using in their campaigns. We are trained to pay attention to images. An image stands out in someone’s mind versus just a worded tweet.

They explored all their options. Oreo actually had an ad running during the Super Bowl. It was a commercial like any other commercial that they spent a lot of money on. But they weren’t content to just sit back and let the commercial do all the talking for them. In today’s world, you must have the ability to have your hand in all the pies, so to speak.

We could all take some notes from Oreo and be better marketers. I think the key thing to take away from all of this is to stay relevant, keep it simple, keep it visual and be engaging. When you’re creating content, writing a Facebook post or a tweet, crafting an email or selling a product, find ways to engage your audience just like Oreo did with their Super Bowl tweet heard around the world.