The Oreo Super Bowl tweet: ‘Lightning in a bottle’
Now that all’s said and done, the game has been played, millions of people watched and companies spent millions of dollars on television ads, all lot of what people are talking about is a tweet. A spur of the moment — opportunistic, even — tweet from Oreo soon after some of the power went out at the Superdome during the Super Bowl, pointing out that you can still dunk in the dark.
It seemed like a whole lot of sound and fury for a single tweet to be the thing that lingers after the Super Bowl, so we called up Ben Winkler. He’s the chief digital officer at OMD, an ad agency in New York.
Oreo’s tweet, said Winkler, was lightning in a bottle but the company spent months cultivating a Twitter following.
“Oreo has been tweeting and posting culturally relevant ads for six months, every day of the week,” he said, noting that Oreo wouldn’t have had its Twitter moment if it hadn’t paid millions of dollars for TV spot that ran during the Super Bowl.
Still, despite the buzz it got, those tweets and re-tweets pale in comparison to the 112 million people watching the Super Bowl on TV. He added that 6 out of 7 people on the Internet don’t use Twitter, and that doesn’t even speak to the many Americans who aren’t even on the web.
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