When brands take advantage of timely events

In order for companies to stay relevant on social media, content has to be timely and engaging to keep people interested. Thinking back to Super Bowl XLVII in 2013, you may remember the 34-minute power outage at the Superdome, which ultimately paused the game and angered many football fans. Oreo’s social media team jumped at the opportunity to engage with frustrated fans by posting an ad that read “Power Out? No problem.” with an image of a solitary Oreo and a caption that read, “You can still dunk in the dark.” To this day, people consider Oreo, its advertising agency’s quick response and the resulting clever ad as one of the greatest Super Bowl marketing tactics to date.

The World Cup is a current popular news focus and big brands have followed in Oreo’s footsteps. They’re engaging with followers by creating content from real time incidents. When Uruguay and Italy played against each other on June 24, 2014, Uruguay striker, Luis Suarez, was accused of biting Italy defender, Giorgio Chiellini on the arm during the game. Similar to Oreo and their Super Bowl genius, brands have jumped all over this opportunity.

Adweek featured top brands that quickly created engaging and funny content that played off the incident. Below are some of our favorites:

Bud Light did a great job at quickly posting the above picture. Call us crazy, but do you think they are implying that the person trying to bite off the Bud Light bottle cap is Luis Suarez?! We hope that was their original plan, because it makes the photo that much better!

This tweet from the Listerine Global account was comical because they simply offered advice that if you’re planning to take a bite of Italian, grab some Listerine afterwards.

We love the above photo from Snickers because it was tweeted directly to Luis Suarez’s twitter account to tell him that next time he’s hungry, just grab a Snickers.

 

Kudos to all the brands that created content from this World Cup incident. Let us know what your favorite ad was from the incident in the comments below!

If you need help with your real time content strategy, call us.

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