The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2013
Oreo's blackout tweet — 'You can still dunk in the dark' — wins Super Bowl night
During the Super Bowl blackout, 360i's rapid-response team tweets a simple Oreo image — 15,000 retweets in an hour, the canonical newsjacking case.
Oreo (Mondelēz International)
What it had to solve
Oreo bought a Super Bowl commercial, but with spots costing around $4 million and a second-screen audience, one TV buy no longer guaranteed attention. Its agencies 360i and MediaVest kept a 15-person mission control in the office, ready to create and approve content in real time during the game.
How it works
During Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013, a power outage blacked out the Mercedes-Benz Superdome for 34 minutes in the third quarter. With no play and no commercials on screen, viewers turned to their second screens — and Oreo and agency 360i were watching from a mission control in New York, a 15-person team of copywriters, strategists and artists ready to respond within ten minutes.
Within minutes of the lights going out, the team posted an image of a lone Oreo in darkness: 'Power out? No problem,' with the caption 'You can still dunk in the dark.' The tweet caught on almost immediately — roughly 15,000 retweets within the first hour and more than 20,000 likes on Facebook — and became the talk of the game.
The speed was an operating decision, not luck: pre-built victory tweets in both teams' colors sat ready, and having the client in the room meant approvals took minutes. Digiday noted the creative effort cost approximately $4 million less than a single TV spot, and Oreo's Instagram following grew from about 2,200 to over 35,000 during the game.
Oreo also ran a paid commercial earlier in the evening, but the blackout tweet dwarfed it culturally. The case is now taught as the canonical newsjacking moment — the point at which real-time marketing went from a tactic to a discipline.
Why it lands
- The brand capitalized on a moment when the game itself had gone silent, so there was no competing content for audience attention.
- The line was pure brand voice — Oreo's 'dunk' language — making the joke feel native rather than opportunistic.
- Pre-built creative and approval workflows compressed a normally days-long ad process into minutes.
- The image was simple enough to spread as a meme, so the audience did the distribution.
What it did
The tweet drew roughly 15,000 retweets within its first hour and more than 20,000 Facebook likes, while Oreo's Instagram following grew from about 2,200 to over 35,000 during the game — earned impact from an asset that cost almost nothing against the roughly $4 million price of a TV spot.
What you can take
Real-time marketing wins when the brand has standing permission to speak, a pre-built approval chain, and creative that turns the moment itself into the message — speed plus voice, not speed alone.
Since then
Oreo's win became the reference case for real-time marketing and newsjacking, covered by Wired, Digiday and The Verge within 24 hours and taught in business-school curricula and agency training ever since. The same 360i team had run the 100-day 'Daily Twist' cultural-response series the year before, and 'Dunk in the Dark' cemented that editorial capability as a brand discipline rather than a one-off stunt.
Sources
- How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter
- How Oreo Won the Super Bowl Blackout
- How Oreo's rapid-response team lit up Twitter with a Super Bowl blackout ad
- Oreo Dunk in the Dark: The Canonical Newsjacking Case Thirteen Years Later
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