Oreo’s Super Bowl wizardry demonstrates that the power is no longer in the planning

First up, an admission. I didn’t tune in to the Super Bowl on Sunday night. With two children under the age of four industriously building a habit of pre-6am rise-and-shine, late nights have increasingly become a thing of the past, so by the time the Ravens-49ers kicked off at 11pm Irish time last night I was already tucked up in bed.
 
The five-minute game highlights wrap generated a mild level of interest this morning but I’m not great with after-the-fact sports events and the thing that caught my attention most was the so-called Super Bowl ad wars.


YouTube user Superbowladsman has put together a playlist of 116 ads from Super Bowl XLVII - if you think your company had a legitimate claim to being one of the world’s biggest consumer brands but you didn’t have an ad in the Super Bowl, then think again.
 
Mercedes-Benz, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Samsung, Doritos and Taco Bell were all well represented. (Apple, of course, are above all this unseemliness...)
 
But Oreo, the manufacturer of biscuits whose appeal doesn’t really translate on this side of the big pond, were undoubtedly the winners - and not just for their 30-second TV offering, a library riot arising from bit of the cookie is the nicest.

This ad not only made most watchers titter but also resulted in a massive social media spike - the Call To Action (CTA) encouraged viewers to follow the brand on Instagram, resulting in instantaneous growth from 2,000 to 35,000 followers on the photo-sharing social network.
 
That alone would have made it a good night for Oreo, but they hit the jackpot later in the evening, and it was the alertness of their marketing team which gained most yardage (sorry...) during Super Bowl XLVII, underscoring a new truth about digital marketing in the age of the social web - that while months of advance planning and seven-figure spending will get you so far, so much power now lies in the immediate.
 
Someone within Oreo was sufficiently tuned in late on Sunday night to act decisively when a power cut threatened to spoil the occasion for millions and millions of viewers.
 
With some rapidfire on-the-spot graphic design, the power of Twitter and, crucially, the executive freedom to do it, Oreo was seemingly on everyone’s lips (um, sorry again...) with a timely tweet. 

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

The tweet was retweeted more than 14,000 times, leading to more than 8,000 new Twitter followers - purely organic growth, too, as unlike the earlier TV ad there was no clear call to action to follow Oreo on Twitter (and thousands did, the majority of them, one suspects, as a way of giving a thumbs-up to their social media smarts).

All of which goes to prove the power of now. Weigh up your marketing decisions, by all means. But if they require drawn-out discussions or approval processes or tomorrow-afternoon meetings, then you’re probably fighting a losing battle when it comes to cresting the wave of the social web.