Spontaneous Superbowl Social Media

Whether you're into American Football or not, you probably realised it was the Superbowl last night... America's biggest advertising spend concentrated into the 30 minute interval (totalling 37% of the country's total advertising revenue for the year!) will have hopefully been worth the average $4 million spent by each advertiser (source: Daily Mail). But it wasn't the paid for advertising that we were all talking about at apt this morning, rather the spontaneous tweets issued by some of the advertisers during the 35 minute blackout three quarters of the way through the game.

During the blackout, Oreo, who had already shown their 'Cookie or Creme' brand ad earlier in the evening, tweeted this ad with the caption "Power out? No problem" - created by agency 360i as they watched the game and realised the creative opportunity the blackout presented.

Meanwhile, Calvin Klein provided an eye-catching distraction by tweeting an image of male model Matthew Terry with the phrase 'since the lights are out...'

Cleverly, Audi used the power outage to take a swipe at rival Mercedes Benz, re-tweeting a post from a Twitter user asking "Did Mercedes-Benz not pay the electric bill? #superbowl" while Bud Light and Volkswagen both posted messages using the keywords 'power outage' and 'blackout' to ensure their posts were seen.

We like the tactical and spontaneous nature of the way advertisers responded to the event... in the evolving discussion about social media in marketing it doesn't get more relevant than that!