Last year the superbowl was suspended for 34 minutes because of an unexpected blackout. During the delay Oreo twitted: “ Power out? No problem”, supported by a starkly-lit image of a solitary cookie and the caption: “You can still dunk in the dark”.

The message caught on almost immediately, getting nearly 150000 retweets and more than 20000 likes on Facebook. No one expected the lights to go out, but they had a good team at the ready. A real-time marketing resulted so impressive that is called “Oreo Moment” that is the hype social most desired by brands.

This year a lot of brands tried to win that fame. They tweeted as if they were match’s real spectators also through personal conversations between them.

This year’s Super Bowl real-time battle was a “ is this account hacked?” face-off between JCPenney and Budweiser and according to the measurement company Tweet Reach, JPC was the most discussed non-sponsor of the game. JCP put out two tweets in a row that many assumed were supposed to be as if the company was pretending to be drunk because tweets were illegible and nonsensical.

It turned out that the person handling JCP’ s twitter account wasn’t drunk, but only  cold and he was just wearing “GO USA” mittens, designed to raise funds for the U.S. Olympic Team.

“We knew Twitter would be very active but wanted to find a way to stay above the Super Bowl fray and instead create our own narrative,” Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman for J.C. Penney, told BuzzFeed in an e-mail. “Given it was cold, and we are selling Go USA mittens — we thought it could be a fun stunt!”The Super Bowl is so crowded that brands are forced to look for different ways to make an impact and as a result, real-time marketing had become more relevant than traditional in-game marketing. 

References:

http://marketingland.com/jpc-win-superbowl-72739

http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/jc-penney-planned-fake-drunk-super-bowl-tweets-to-create-own