Oreo’s social media blackout ad was hit of 2013 Super Bowl

When the lights went out on the Super Bowl Sunday, Raven’s coach John Harbaugh looked a bit upset about his team losing its momentum.  And the big advertisers like Coke and and Pepsi didn’t like having their carefully planned series of ads disrupted.

For me, though the big deal to come out of half-hour lights out delay was the fact that Oreo was able to execute, approve and deliver a brilliant little social media ad within minutes of the outage starting.

As Ad Age reports, other advertisers also jumped in, but few did it as well as Oreo did.  They note that Oreo’s agency put together the creative (the image) and got it approved within minutes.  And once it was out there, people retweeted the message more than 10,000 times within an hour.  Ad Age was arguing on Monday that Oreo got a bigger bang out of this simple message that the cookie company did out of its elaborate (and expensive) TV commercial.

To me, this commercial represents everything that’s wrong with Super Bowl commercials these days.  They work so hard at giving us something exciting and fun to watch that they forget to tell us anything about the brand.  The TV ad is funny, but the lights out quickie ad made me want cookies and milk.