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Four times brand Twitter was so totally on top of it
Advertising IRL

Four times brand Twitter was so totally on top of it

Advertising IRL
Who’s a good boy? Sherlock is a good boy. Yes he is. Yes he is.

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, obviously, the objectively best use of fast-moving brand Twitter is when you can tweet at KLM and they immediately deploy an adorable beagle named Sherlock to return your lost phone to you. Obviously.

But not every brand has been as successful as KLM in their efforts to be on the ball. Entenmann’s famously leapt before they looked and in so doing associated their baked goods with the Casey Anthony verdict. Kenneth Cole accidentally inserted themselves into the Arab Spring in 2011. There is a delicate art to seeing a timely opportunity or a promising Twitter trend and jumping on it at the right time, in the right way. Here are four examples — far from the only examples, but certainly four good ones — of a brand being quick on the draw and accurate in their aim.

DiGiorno live-tweets The Sound of Music

Now, why, exactly, did DiGiorno decide to live-tweet NBC’s The Sound of Music Live? Because… because they just did, so, like, shut up. The tweets were, per brand manager Brian Linz, “absolutely spontaneous,” which makes it all the more impressive that they didn’t wander into even a single horrible mistake with a pizza-related Dad joke about Nazis.

Instead, we got the most wonderfully… [frantically Googles for alternative to “cheesy”; fails] cheesy Sound of Music tweets. 

(Unfortunately, the following year, DiGiorno did step in it by accidentally implying that frozen pizza was a reason an abused spouse might stay with their abuser, turning them into an entirely different case study about how not to take advantage of trending topics on social media.)

Side effects of Ambien do not include…

Last year, Sanofi US demonstrated Twitter responsiveness that, though it wasn’t exactly spur-of-the-moment fast, showed their ability to put out the right message at the right time. (Sometimes, circumspection beats speed, particularly when delicate topics like, for instance, straight-up racism are involved.) When Roseanne Barr was fired from her eponymous show in 2018 for a series of super-racist tweets and then blamed the whole thing on Ambien, Sanofi came into the office the following morning ready to remind the world that no, Ambien is more of a “eat all the yogurt in the fridge and then wake up and wonder where all the yogurt went” kind of a sleep aid.

No comment yet from Memorial Day on how it felt also receiving some of the blame for Roseanne being hella racist.

Arby’s wants its hat back

Back on the fun, funny side of things: Pharrell Williams is a consummate nontraditional fashion plate, and when he walked onstage at the 2014 Grammys to collect Album of the Year honors, the only headwear that could have pulled focus from Daft Punk’s signature, full-face robot helmets was his semi-crumpled Smokey Bear hat. Or, alternately, his Arby’s hat, because while Smokey didn’t hop on Twitter to reclaim his headgear, Arby’s social media team was right there.

That eight-word tweet had garnered 75,000 retweets and 40,000 favorites by the following morning, as well as a response from Pharrell himself (naturally) and even open appreciation from other brands. (Showing its own quickness, Hyundai’s creative team was able to come up with their own Best Tweet award to present to Arby’s shortly thereafter.)

Oreo dunks in the dark

Oreo’s Twitter team gets points for speed and degree of difficulty for its 2013 contribution to Super Bowl history. Picture it: Super Bowl XLVII. New Orleans, Louisiana. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Stadium officials crank up the air chillers to dispel the smoke from Beyonce’s halftime tour de force, triggering a power outage that plunged the stadium into near blackness. What is to be done?! Who is on top of this?!

Agency 360i was on top of something, certainly, and their suggestion of what to be done was to eat an Oreo cookie. (Which is pretty much always a good idea anyway.) And that suggestion came at 8:48 p.m. — a good half-hour before the stadium regained full power.

The rundown of that fateful day, as recounted by the people involved, is pretty amazing (at least for those of us who are full-on advertising dorks). It started with the entire team (Kraft, 360i, and media agency MediaVest) being fully prepped for full responsiveness, with a spreadsheet of social media options for every foreseeable eventuality. So although this particular eventuality wasn’t all that foreseeable, the creative team was already limbered up and ready to go.

Even when time is of the essence, it’s important not to go too fast. Half-baked creative delivered at light speed is still half-baked, and a joking tweet in the midst of what could turn out to be a natural disaster or terrorist act is vastly worse than no tweet at all. So all concepting and copywriting had to come while keeping an eye on the news to make sure the situation remained tweetable. Creative director Michael Nuzzo reports that the post itself was assembled in the space of a minute, and Twitter was buzzing about it while the stadium maintenance guy’s ears were still ringing from ch.

Time elapsed from blackout to tweet? ‘Round about ten minutes.

Six years later, that tweet is still ingrained as a part of brand Twitter history, and the Superdome’s maintenance people are definitely still hearing, “Hey, remember the time you turned on the air conditioning and blew out the Super Bowl?” at every Super Bowl party they attend. Because some people are just jerks. They made one mistake, y’all. Let it go already.

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