The ad was a tweet, so there is no video. Here it is as Oreo posted it:
Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC
— OREO Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013
Most Super Bowl ads cost millions to make and millions more to air. One of the most talked-about ads of Super Bowl XLVII was not a commercial at all. On February 3, 2013, after halftime, the lights in the New Orleans Superdome went out for about half an hour. At 8:48 p.m., Oreo posted a single picture to Twitter with the words “Power out? No problem,” and a line that became famous: “You can still dunk in the dark.”
It looked spontaneous, but it was prepared. The agency 360i had a war room for the game with about ten people in it, including writers, designers and strategists, and staff at Kraft, Oreo’s parent company, were part of the approval chain. The account of the night in Digiday’s oral history says the creative director Michael Nuzzo had the post assembled in under a minute, and the wording “You can still dunk in the dark” came from a Kraft brand manager during approval.
The result was out of proportion to the effort. The tweet was retweeted almost 15,000 times, and Oreo’s Twitter following grew by about 8,000. The next day the Huffington Post wrote that one of the most buzz-worthy ads of the game was “a mere tweet from Oreo during the blackout.”
The lesson of the tweet is not speed alone. Oreo had built a team and an approval process before it knew what would happen, so it could act the moment something did. Many brands have tried to copy the idea since, and it works best when the approval process is built for speed, as Oreo’s was.
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