One of America’s favorite sporting events, the Super Bowl, was held on Sunday, 3 February 2013.  The Super Bowl is the final championship game in the NFL (National Football League) and is widely celebrated throughout America.   The Super Bowl is such a popular event that it is the one time of the year people actually look forward to watching television advertisements.  The reason is that the companies spend a fortune (~ US$ 4 million, equalling about RM 12,000,000, per 30 seconds of ad space) to not only communicate their product but to make it the most entertaining commercial.

Interestingly, there was a surprising power outage in the second half of the game.  Who immediately and successfully seized this opportunity?  Oreo.  That’s right, the chocolate cookie with white frosting on the inside.

With just a couple of words, a simple and catchy image, and a click of a button on Twitter, Oreo released a viral tweet.  

Oreo’s Success Points for its Super Bowl Tweet:

• Retweeted over 14,000 times (then think of all the followers of those retweeters who saw that Tweet)
• Marked as favorite tweet over 4,900 times
• Written widely in major online publications, including Business Insider, Mashable, Huffington Post, and more (each one of these online publications attracts millions of unique visitors per month – unique visitors is a rough approximation of people)

How much did this clever, instantaneous marketing initiative on Twitter cost them?  Nothing.  That’s smart marketing with Twitter.  The 24 hour life cycle and realtime actions of the internet are leading to more instantaneous and creative marketing tactics.

Check out their famous tweet below.

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Photo Credit: Oreo’s Twitter Page