Did you watch the Super Bowl? Since every one out of two Tvs where on the Super Bowl, I bet you did.
Did you see when the lights went out? What did you do during that time?
Some companies didn’t miss a beat and found a out of the box opportunity to promote themselves.
They went to Twitter. Twitter says there were 24.1 million tweets sent about the football game and halftime show on Sunday night. The largest spike was during the power outage, when Twitter saw 3,858 tweets per second. Some perspective: Five years ago, at Super Bowl XLII, the highest spike was 27 tweets per second.
So during those 35 minutes here is what some companies Tweeted:
Oreo: Tweeted 10 minutes into the black out: The ad said: Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.
That post was re-tweeted 14,600 times as of Monday morning. It received more than 20,000 “likes” on Facebook.
Tide was also fast and released the ad: “We can’t get your blackout. But we can get your stains out,” Tide tweeted, earning about 1,300 retweets.
Walgreens told its followers that “we do carry candles,” a sales pitch retweeted more than 3,300 times.
PBS: This might be a good time think about alternative programming. #SuperBowlBlackOut #WeHaveDowntonPBS This one tweeted more than 3,500 times.
And there were others.
This is brilliant not because these are brilliant ads, but because they realized people were paying attention to the black out and talking about it and these companies managed to join the conversation already going on in the mind of the prospect.
Clever way to get a lot of attention. This is what I call Neuro- Magnetism: You use your brain to join the brain of the consumer in a subtle and effective way.
Every one that you interact with has a conversation already going on and it is up to you to see that and join this conversation instead of trying to divert this attention to something else. A lot less work and much more traction.
When you see an opportunity surface, like these companies did with the black out, run and take action. Speed to market is crucial at these times. Not a lot of thinking, do it.