Oreo Outage Tweet Goes Viral After Super Bowl 2013 Power Failure (WATCH OREO COMMERCIAL)
A power failure during the second half of Sunday's Super Bowl game that caused one half of the power outage at the Mercedes Benz Superdome and the stadium's scoreboards to go out, inspired the creative employees of Oreo to capitalize on the opportunity to grab the attention of millions during the 34-minute power outage.
Oreo, who aired a hilarious "Cookie or Crème" commercial during the first half of the game, sent out a genius tweet that read: "Power out? No problem, you can still dunk in the dark."
The Twitter send-up was retweeted almost 15,000 times and their followers on the social media site jumped from 23,000 to over 70,000 at press time.
The brilliant social media strategy is being lauded in business reports, and is considered the most clever Super Bowl ad of the night that didn't cost anything. All of the 30-second commercials that aired during the game cost companies up to $4 million.
"We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity," agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. "Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes.
"The big question is, what happens when everything changes, when you go off script?" Hofstetter said. "That was where it got fun."
"They saw a real-time opportunity with the power outage and jumped it, doing so in a social voice true to the Oreo brand," Laurie Guzzinati, a spokeswoman for Mondelez, the new parent company of Oreo, wrote in an e-mail to The San Francisco Gate.
Other brands followed suit, including Calvin Klein and Tide.
"We can't get your #blackout, but we can get your stains out. #SuperBowl #TidePower," Tide detergent company joked in a Tweet.
The blackout proved to be the biggest Twitter moment of the night- over 231,000 tweets per minute were generated during the 35-minute period, according to CNN.
Watch Oreo's Super bowl 2013 commercial titled "Whisper Fight" in the video below
