Some of the greatest marketing opportunities can just be simple and opportunistic.
An example of this occurred on February 3, 2013 – the night of Superbowl XLVII.
During the third quarter of the game, a power outage caused the lights to go out in half of the stadium, stopping play for 34 minutes.
The Superbowl is arguably the biggest sporting spectacle in the world with over a hundred million viewers worldwide.
So, what do you think these people did? They turned to social media.
The popular cookie brand Oreo capitalised on this opportunity by tweeting a solitary cookie with the caption “You Can Still Dunk in The Dark” within 35 minutes of the outage.
It received 10,000 retweets, 18,000 likes, 5000 shares and was seen by hundreds of thousands of people within the first hour! To borrow an American sporting colloquialism, it was a home run regarding a brand’s opportunistic usage of social media.
With hundreds of millions of tweets throughout the Superbowl, you want to insert your brand into that conversation.
Tide was another brand that capitalised on this short window of opportunity with their "We Can’t Get The Blackout, But We Can Get Your Stains Out” campaign.
Terrific marketing.