To celebrate Oreo’s 100th anniversary, Kraft-Nabisco kicked off the Daily Twist – a one-hundred day campaign that aimed to provide a new piece of culturally-relevant social content every day, in real time.

From TV ads,

http://youtu.be/6kMWLYYcAYw

To Twitter content,

To Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and their own dedicated Daily Twist site, there was no social media stone left unturned. There was even a piece in the The New York Times about the Daily Twist’s finale, where they took consumer submissions for ad ideas and produced the ads for an actual competition.

It garnered tons of accolades, and for good reason. Oreo saw a “280 percent increase in Facebook shares and 510 percent increase in re-tweets on Twitter”, with at least 10,000 likes per post on Facebook and over 80,000 followers on Twitter. And you can’t put a price on breathing cultural relevancy and new life into an old brand.

Personally, I loved it. There’s just something so fantastic about the Daily Twist – not only is the content refreshing and funny, but it’s so relatable and accessible. The Daily Twist covered everything from Gay Pride to Gangnam Style and the Superbowl Blackout. And, besides, who doesn’t love Oreos? This is a great example of social media done right. Not only was Oreo connecting to its target base through all kinds of media, they were listening, connecting, and incorporating peoples’ thoughts and ideas into the campaign. Now, Oreo isn’t just the chocolate cookie you ate as a kid – it’s the cool, hip cookie of a new generation.

If someone asks you, ‘Why is print media dying?’, you would probably get an answer like ‘people don’t read newspapers or magazines anymore.’ That may be true, but this blog post from Kit Garrett points to an entirely different reason. According to Kit, print media companies make it ridiculously difficult to place ads into newspapers and the like. It’s not going to be declining readership that will be the death of print media, it’ll be the slow-moving companies that will speed their own demise.

I find this extremely interesting, because you don’t hear of companies inserting more and more middlemen – it’s usually the opposite.

So, why keep using print media when nobody reads newspapers anymore and it’s such a huge hassle to set up?

Creative Swiffer advertising in a free Metro newspaper.

I use transit every day, to commute to school, work, and play. Whenever I see a free newspaper box, I usually take a copy and thumb through it while waiting for the bus. I find that I pay a lot more attention to what’s on a newspaper page than, say, a Facebook page – there’s a lot of advertising packed into these two different types of pages, but what’s the difference?

Would you actually click through to any of these links?

For some reason, a company running a print campaign in a national magazine gains much more legitimacy in my eyes than a company running an online campaign. I am inherently distrustful of online ads, because it often feels like I’m being bombarded left and right with ads by extremely sketchy-looking companies. Advertising in print carries much more weight to it – do you remember any one of the thousands of online ads you’ve seen today?  For that reason, I don’t think print is going to go away any time soon.