How Oreo Cookie ate from the Super Bowl

If any business still wonders whether they should be on Twitter, they should take note of the likely future Harvard Business School case study “How Oreo Cookie ate from the Super Bowl.” The key learning points:

Pay for the Ticket of Admission

You have to pay to play goes the saying and in this case, the ticket price is significant, $3,8 million for a 30 second commercial. Even if companies not placing Super Bowl ads also could get into the social media conversation during the game, it is more likely that you will be top of mind and followed by the socialverse if you have at least one entry in the ad mix. Oreo's entry was quite an engaging at that at least according to me and my 9-year-old daughter watching it. You judge for yourself:

http://youtu.be/6kMWLYYcAYw

Prepare the Decision Makers

It has now been quite established that companies need to prepare the IT infrastructure for spikes in traffic during the Super Bowl. Also, if you  sell online, you may need customer service and order representatives on standby to ensure that everything runs smoothly. In this case, the preparedness was manifested in how the agency 360i set up a mission control room where they monitored the game. Key was also to include Oreo executives of sufficient seniority so that the team could get necessary approvals on the spot.

Expect the Unexpected

Finally, the mission of the team seems to have been to be on the lookout for noteworthy things during the broadcast and then quickly come up with engaging content related to it. Why is this effective? Well, as David Meerman Scott calls it in “Newsjacking,” you act fast to get included as part of a bigger story or the second paragraphs of newspapers covering the bigger story. Also, this blog post is just one of many others writing about this right now. So, what did this Oreo team come up with? Well, when the power went out during the game, Oreo went to work and after 15 minutes, the posted the following tweet.

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013