So it's been two days since the Super Bowl and I still can't get away from people talking about a cookie ad. Not even a real ad: a single tweet Oreo put out during the blackout. If you missed it (were you not on Twitter Sunday night? impressive), here's the short version: the lights went out in the Superdome for about half an hour in the third quarter, nobody quite knew what was happening, and while the rest of us sat there refreshing our feeds, Oreo's team posted a plain black image of half a cookie with the line "You can still dunk in the dark." That's it. That's the whole thing.
And it worked, obviously, or I wouldn't be writing about it on Tuesday. It got retweeted something like fifteen thousand times in the first day, which for a single non-video, non-contest tweet from a cookie brand is a lot. AdAge and a few other places have already reported that Oreo (working with their agency, 360i) had a whole team parked in a "war room" for the entire game, just watching Twitter and waiting to react to whatever happened. Copywriters, a legal person on standby, art director, the works. Not for the game itself, but for whatever weird thing might happen during the game that they could jump on inside of ten minutes.
I keep going back and forth on how I feel about that. On one hand, credit where it's due, it's genuinely well executed. The image is simple, the joke lands immediately, and they got it out fast enough that it was still relevant instead of feeling like leftovers. Ten minutes is fast for any organization, let alone one that presumably has three layers of brand approval to get through normally.
On the other hand I think we're about to enter a really tedious stretch where every brand's social media manager tries to be the next Oreo blackout tweet, and 95% of it is going to be forced and bad. You can already feel it coming. Somebody in a meeting somewhere this week is pitching "what if we had our own war room" for a product launch that has nothing urgent or newsworthy attached to it at all, and the resulting tweet is going to be a strained pun with a stock photo, and it's going to get forty retweets, twelve of which are from employees. I've seen this pattern before with brands chasing whatever worked once for somebody else (remember when every company had to have a Groupon deal for about a year?) and it rarely translates.
What actually interests me about the whole thing, more than the tweet itself, is the staffing model behind it. A dedicated room of people, on a Sunday night, just watching for something to happen so they can turn a reaction around in minutes instead of days — that's basically running social media like a newsroom, and I don't think most companies are set up to do that, budget-wise or culturally. Most marketing departments I've dealt with (secondhand, through friends who work in it, not personally, thankfully) need a sign-off chain longer than the tweet itself. If "real-time marketing" is going to be a phrase people actually use going forward, and I suspect it is now, it's going to require companies to trust some fairly junior person to hit publish on something representing the whole brand with basically no review. That's the actual shift here, not the pun about dunking.
Also, small tangent, but has anyone else noticed how much of the internet's reaction to a 34-minute power outage during the biggest live TV event of the year got funneled through "wasn't that Oreo tweet great" instead of, you know, questions about why a several-hundred-million-dollar stadium lost power on national TV. I'm not saying there's a conspiracy or anything, I just think it's funny that the story people are still talking about Tuesday is the cookie joke and not the infrastructure failure that made the joke possible in the first place. Priorities.
Anyway. If you run any kind of brand account, or even a personal one for that matter, the lesson isn't "be funny fast," it's "have someone who's allowed to hit publish without asking four people first." Most places don't have that. I don't even have that for this blog and it's just me.