23
Newsjacking Your Way into the Media
Shortly after halftime during Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans suffered a power outage causing half of the lights to go dark and play to be suspended for some 35 minutes. It took just seconds for people to start talking about #BlackoutBowl on Twitter and other social networks. Within a few minutes, Oreo, a popular sandwich cookie, tweeted from @Oreo, “Power out? No problem,” with a photo of an Oreo cookie on a table in a dark room with the caption “You can still dunk in the dark.” Some 14,000 people re-tweeted in real-time and over the next few hours, hundreds of mainstream news outlets and bloggers including CNN, NBC, CNET, and Forbes talked up the tweet.
Newsjacking.
As hundreds of millions of people pondered the power disruption, Oreo seized the moment in real-time and injected their brand into the most talked about news story at that time. As a result of a single tweet that took only several minutes to create, millions of people were exposed to the Oreo brand. Compare this to the traditional approach of paying a reported $3.7 million for 30 seconds of television airtime plus the creative and production costs to make a 30 second spot, which was how most brands chose to get noticed.
As we'll see in this chapter, this newsjacking from Oreo succeeded because it was very fast to market, it was witty and fun, it was noncontroversial, and it tied back to the brand and its messages.
It's not just ...