| HN Mirror

Basically, it got them a lot of recognition for fast ad turn around time, on black swan event. No one expected the power to go out at the game. Heck, Entergy (the utility) didn't expect anything like that to happen. Everyone expects event appropriate ads for the easy to predict or contingency stuff (e.g. post game ads for appropriate for each team's win, even post game ads differentiating between blowout and close conditions for each team) - we all know that those are all ready to go. But a decent add responding to the unpredictable, in a timely way opens a lot of new possibilities. This ad would be downright stupid if it happened after the fact. Further, the later into the event it happens, the lower the amusing aspect of it is to people. In situations like this, the timing is everything. You know that "oh it would have been funny to say $witty_comment" feeling? Advertisers get it too.

So the big deal is oreo just showed the general public that you can have big corporate response to real-time events (for smaller step sizes than before), in a way that the public just didn't think possible.

It's Tuesday morning, and I'm still talking about a superbowl ad. This doesn't happen. I've never discussed a super bowl ad any later than monday evening happy hour, no matter how good. I've written and said and read the word oreo more times in the last day than I had in the month prior. Even assuming they paid 15 people overtime, I'm pretty sure the cost of this compared to the amount of airtime they get over this beats the cost/coverage numbers for almost any other superbowl ad. So, how is it not a win for oreo?