9 Brands That Thought Fast on Social Media During the Super Bowl

Mashable today put together a post on 9 brands that were quick on their feet during the Super Bowl yesterday, and used social media to prove their marketing mastery.

Screen shot 2013-02-04 at 3.01.04 PMThe strongest example, as Mashable reports, was Oreo, whose quick-witted ad hit just minutes after the power went out at the stadium.

The ad said, “No power? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.” It was retweeted nearly 15,000 times and won respect for making the most of the situation. It created even more buzz than its TV ad, which cost millions of dollars to air and surely massively expensive to produce. Oreo also had some clever Beyonce tweets before the blackout.

Jim Beam posted a picture of its Black Double Aged liquor to Facebook, saying “in case you missed the memo… tonight’s big game ‘power outage’ was sponsored by Jim Beam Black.”

Walgreens was also ready with some timely tweets:

Screen shot 2013-02-04 at 3.03.21 PMPBS won big encouraging people to switch the channel to watch its popular TV show, Downton Abbey, saying that now might be the time to think about alternative programming – hint, hint.

Twitter said it took just four minutes after the lights went out for the first advertiser to bid on “power outage” as a search term. Brands such as Bud Light and Speed Stick were among the bidders, while Calvin Klein purchased “blackout.” This means anyone on the micro-blogging site searching for those key words were shown tweets from those brands at the top.