How Advertisers Made the Super Bowl Power Outage Work for Them

How Advertisers Made The Super Bowl Power Outage Work For Them

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The Mercedes-Benz Superdome after a sudden power outage in the second half during Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Call it the Super Bowl of real-time marketing.

Savvy advertisers quickly took to Twitter tonight to capitalize on the unexpected power outage during this year’s Super Bowl. “We do carry candles,” Walgreens tweeted when the power went out at the Super Bowl. “We also sell lights.” Oreo tweeted, “Power out? No problem,” posting an ad that finished, “You can still dunk in the dark.” Meanwhile, Tide tweeted, “We can’t get your # blackout, but we can get your stains out,” posting its own ad.Audi took a direct hit at competitor and Superdome naming rights-holder Mercedes-Benz with this tweet: “Sending some LEDs to the @mbusa Superdome right now…”

They and other marketers responded to–indeed, capitalized on–an unprecedented event with instant on-brand communication.

“This is an example of the new world of marketing where things happen so fast, where brands respond real time to the environment,” said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management. “In the Super Bowl tonight we saw advertisers respond to other advertisers–for example, right after Mio runs their spot, SodaStream puts out a tweet that says, ‘ @ makeitmio is delicious in SodaStream! Try it sometime.’ Everybody is responding incredibly fast. This is a huge change. It used to be you created a Super Bowl ad and you were done. Now what’s happening is marketers are generating content and interacting with people all throughout the game,” he said.

“What was nice about the power outage is everybody jumped on their mobile devices when the power went out and everybody started talking about the game but moreso about the ads, which was a positive development because it gave the early advertisers an even bigger impact,” Calkins said. It’s a consequence of marketing’s speed that during the Super Bowl advertisers are creating new messages every few minutes.

What are the implications on the Super Bowl as an ad stage? “The Super Bowl provides a platform and prompts a discussion,” Calkins said. “A Super Bowl ad is a ticket to participate in all of these discussions, because very few people are talking about brands that aren’t on the Super Bowl tonight. The brands on the Super Bowl–either good or bad–are being talked about. What it says is that marketing is really changing because you have to respond so fast. Getting a Super Bowl ad is important but it’s just the first step.”

So how can brands measure the ROI of instant advertising? “It’s very tough, but it’s very smart,” Calkins said. “When SodaStream is out there commenting on other people’s ads, it’s just a way to multiply the effect of your spending.”