The Super Bowl is the biggest pop culture event of the year in the U.S. It’s also a huge day for marketers investing in Big Game advertisements. In 2013, for the first time ever, Oreo entered the fray as a Super Bowl advertiser. Their objective was to use social to maximize their investment and cut through the clutter.

In the middle of the third quarter, the stadium unexpectedly lost power. While viewers and commentators grappled with an unforeseen break in game-play, Oreo saw an opportunity to capture the attention of the brand’s audience. The timing was perfect to own the moment.

Oreo is a 100-year-old brand that has used social to place itself at the center of the cultural dialogue. The solution – to re-imagine the biggest headlines from the Super Bowl in real time – is just one example of the brand’s broader strategy to use social media to reflect cultural milestones and events back on its audience.

The Oreo Blackout Tweet resonated with Oreo fans for two key reasons: 1) Because the real-time response was on-brand – these types of quick-witted responses have resonated with fans in the past – and 2) Because the moment was right for this particular type of content.

As commentators stumbled over ways to fill the space, Oreo took to social to respond in real-time to the surprise event. The insight: lacking commercials, game-play and entertainment, viewers would flock to social media to discuss what had happened. Oreo would meet them there.

Within minutes, Oreo designed and published a piece of content that was hyper-relevant to the unfolding news. It’s now famously known as the “Oreo Blackout Tweet.” A Super Bowl command center that included Oreo’s agency team and key brand execs from Oreo allowed the brand to quickly align all stakeholders at the moment the story broke.

From a single tweet, Oreo saw huge impact. The "Dunk in the Dark" image was shared on Twitter and Facebook more than 20,000 times and garnered 525 million earned media impressions – 5X the number of people who tuned in to watch the game.

In fact, Oreo garnered 10,000 more mentions on Twitter than Joe Flacco, the quarterback for the winning team and Super Bowl MVP (Source: Topsy). Wired magazine declared Oreo as the Super Bowl winner, and Adweek ranked the tweet as one of the top five ‘ads’ of the night. All of this was achieved through zero media dollars.