It’s safe to say that at the prom that was Superbowl 2013, Oreo was queen. Maybe even king. To put it simply, every brand wanted to be Oreo after that. #popular.
But should that be something to aspire to? Don’t people eventually get tired of prom queens?
I gave this some thought in the days that followed America’s epic sports event. And while I certainly risk bodily harm dredging up the Superbowl, I feel like we need to address the Oreo situation and why it was so successful.
So, for those of you who missed it, a recap: Oreo just launched a two-month campaignby asking fans this age-old question: Which part of an Oreo is better? As part of the campaign, folks were asked to submit photos of their favorite things on Instagram with one of two hashtags: #cookiethis or #cremethis. The best photos were then turned into – get this – cookie or créme sculptures. Pics of the sculptures were then uploaded to IG. In tandem with their power outage tweet, Oreo’s efforts nabbed them 50,000 followers on Instagram in a very short amount of time. Solid. (Digital.) Gold. ??
But as Oreo celebrates early victory with the campaign via the addition of tons of new Instagram followers, we need to resist the urge to attribute their success to a single approach. Why? Because it’s dangerous for marketers to assign too much importance to picking the single ‘right’? channel. Just like you can’t make a ‘viral video,’? you can’t make inroads into a market via just one tactic.
What made Oreo successful was that it packaged together a cohesive paid, owned and earned media strategy that made it impossible to ignore, and even afforded them the opportunity to capitalize on sentiment from the event with an off-the-cuff tweet about the power outage. Follow-up social activations will only serve to strengthen their efforts and sustain brand buzz. In short, they’re making the campaign work by not letting this exercise turn them into a one-trick pony.
The point is, there’s never a single, silver-bullet style solution to developing digital strategy. And there shouldn’t be. The campaigns that get noticed – like the one from Oreo – do so not because they pursued a single channel and crossed their fingers it’d work out, but because they did their homework and attacked on multiple fronts, and will continue to do so moving forward.
