Oreo's Super Bowl Power-Outage Tweet Was 18 Months In The Making

Oreo / MondelezThe tweet heard round the world when the power went out at the Super Bowl this year — Oreo's "Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark" — was a year and a half in planning, Mondelez svp Lisa Mann told the 4A's conference.

The brand began planning almost two years ago, Ad Exchanger reports, as Oreo approached its 100th birthday. The company decided that it would do something in social media every day rather than just occasionally:

The company eventually set up a war room to figure out what was meaningful to its followers -- who include some 32 million individuals on Facebook and about 80,000 on Twitter.

One of its early successes was the gay pride Oreo Facebook post from June last year.

So when the lights went out at the New Orleans Super Dome during the Ravens v. 49ers game, Oreo had a well-oiled machine in place that was used to interacting live in social media every day.

The tweet was retweeted more than 16,000 times, and became one of the more memorable ad moments of the game.

Plus, of course, the company had bought a Super Bowl ad of its own, and was thus expecting a wave of tweets based on it.