While half-watching the Super Bowl, my girlfriend tells me “Have you seen Oreo’s stunt on Twitter? It’s everywhere!”

Indeed, after close to 15,000 retweets, this tweet from Oreo has generated a lot of buzz:

An article by Buzzfeed has some details on the stunt (for example that the agency responsible for this is  360i), but roughly:

  • At about 8:30PM, half of the stadium is hit with a power outage
  • About 20 minutes later, Oreo publishes its tweet on the situation, creative included.

How were they able to react so fast?

An ensemble of situations made it that it was possible to witness the events, develop a quick concept, get the go-ahead from the brand, execute it, have it approved and then publish it.

360i had set up a mission control room to monitor reactions to the brand’s ad that had been aired earlier during the game. In this room, you had the agency people AND the brand executives from Oreo.

It was thus very easy to decide to act, create the concept, get it approved and proceed.

But one aspect remains key to all this. When a brand decides to buy an ad spot in the Super Bowl, everything is thought out, prepared, over-tested, focus groups and all. How is this culture of over-preparation compatible with a less-than-20-minutes reaction? We can’t say all advertisers are willing to move that fast, especially not during the Super Bowl!

You have to dig a little to see that 360i and Oreo already had experience in the quick-release. Recently, for the brand’s 100th anniversary, the agency had developed a campaign where, for 100 days, a new ad was posted daily on social media, based on the day’s news and headlines. This campaign, the Daily Twist, worked really well and had most surely created a great deal of trust between the brand and the agency.

So here it is. Guts, creativity, a monitoring war room that assembled agency and brand executives, combined with a relationship based  on experience and trust. This is the recipe for the success of this stunt.

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