If you're looking to drop a bon mot on Twitter during this year's Super Bowl, you're going to have lots of competition.
Some brands advertising in the game — and many who aren't — are planning to set up war rooms and even have celebrities on hand to chime in on events during the Super Bowl. In the best-case scenario, one brand will win the night with a winning line the vein of Oreo's famed "blackout tweet" from 2013.
See also: 4 Steps to Explosive Real-Time Marketing
Volkswagen, for instance, is holing up 15 VW marketers and agency partners in a war room in Santa Monica, Calif., waiting for opportunities on Twitter. "The idea is to try to make this as engaging as possible for our consumers," says Vinay Shahani, VP of marketing for VW. Shahani says the brand will "try to be as contextually relevant as possible and deliver content that’s relevant to whatever the conversation is." VW has compiled a trove of media assets for the event, and if the right moment presents itself, the brand might drop a Vine video or maybe just an apropos tweet.
VW didn't have a war room last year, but Shahani believes it's essential to be part of the social media conversation during a big event like the Super Bowl. "This is a second screen opportunity," he says. "That's how people consume media now."
Likewise, M&M's is setting up a war room too, but is upping its game by putting Joe Montana on its roster. Montana will provide some analysis of the game while Yellow, the brand's animated "spokescandy," will provide some humor. Throughout the game, M&M's will also tap Twitter, Facebook, Vine and Instagram to distribute stop-motion video content and imagery made with M&M's Peanut lentils (yes, they call them that.)
In Richmond, Va., Carmax will also set up a 15-person war room charged with finding moments to tag with #slowclap, a hashtag affiliated with the brand's Super Bowl ad. "We're looking at game night as a sort of virtual Super Bowl party," says Laura Donahue, VP of advertising for CarMax. CarMax dropped its Super Bowl ad on YouTube a week and a half before the game. Donahue says the ad has prompted a lot of opportunities for social media discussion. "We think those opportunities are going to be very prevalent during the game," she says.
Few brands set up war rooms prior to the 2013 Super Bowl. Oreo's tweet is viewed as a breakthrough moment, though, in which brands suddenly realized the value of real-time marketing. "It was certainly a well-executed move on their part," Donahue says, referring to Oreo. "It was timely, creative, attention-grabbing..." Yet brands like CarMax don't see Oreo's feat as a one-off as much as a vehicle for illuminating the possibilities of a new form of marketing.
That said, there's no consensus that real-time marketing gives a real boost to any brand or product. "It's stupid for brands to be falling all over themselves to replicate Oreo's and Arby's success," B.J. Mendelson, author of Social Media is Bullshit, wrote in an email, citing Arby's Grammys tweet. Mendelson says he believes such time and energy would be better spent elsewhere; in his view, the Oreo tweet has been blown out of proportion by a navel-gazing media. As Mendelson likes to point out, only 15% of the U.S. population is on Twitter.
Despite such objections, many brands this year will try to take their moon shots. Marketers concede that it's hard to make the case that a single tweet will persuade anyone to buy their product. Instead, the goal is to circulate the brand's name and get it in consumers' consideration set. "The more touchpoints you have with consumers, the more you can portray who you are as a brand, what you have to offer," says VW's Shahani. "You want to be on the list when the time is right."
See also: The Top 10 Most-Shared Super Bowl Ads of All Time
In Oreo's case, the much-discussed Super Bowl 2013 tweet made the brand more culturally relevant, says Sarah Hofstetter, CEO of 360i, the agency behind the tweet. "It did what the entire social media strategy is supposed to do — relate the brand to people's everyday experiences," she says. Has it sold more Oreos? The brand's parent company, Mondelez, won't say. Hofstetter says since Oreo also ran a Super Bowl ad last year, it would be impossible to isolate the effect of the tweet, anyway.
While Hofstetter is proud of the tweet and how it raised the visibility of real-time marketing, she's quick to point out that brands had commented in real-time on the Super Bowl prior to 2013. Coca-Cola's Polar Bear mascots did so the year before. Now that everyone has caught onto the trend and is setting up war rooms, she expects the cutting-edge brands to up their game. For instance, Toyota, a 360i client, plans to have Muppets comment on the action in real time. (The Disney-owned characters appear in Toyota's Super Bowl ad this year.)
"There's so much pressure to not just do a war room but create content that has greater longevity," she says. "And that's hard."
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