Here is a look at some of our personal favourite brand reactions to current affairs and fan mentions, including posts from Oreo, Tesco Mobile and Paddy Power.
1. Oreo
We begin with one of the most famous brand reactives of all time, the Oreo black-out tweet. Back in 2013, during the superbowl, many brands were poised ready for any sort of bandwagon to jump on and easily the most successful one was this. The stadium in which the Super Bowl was taking place suffered an almighty black out and play was stopped which meant that the brands had time to get to work on their reactions.
Oreo sent out the above tweet saying, ‘No power? No problem.’ and attaching an original image of an Oreo in the dark with the caption ‘You can still dunk in the dark’. The tweet got a lot of attention with over 15,000 re-tweets and subsequent positive write ups stating that the tweet had won the marketing Super Bowl.
2. Tesco Mobile
Tesco Mobile are one of the brand kings on twitter for me, their tweets are consistently funny and well timed. I can only assume they hire struggling stand-up comedians to write their tweets. Which would make sense with their previous #nojoke campaign which featured well-known comedians as the face of it. One of their most famous retorts can be seen above and is a great example of when reactive tweets go right, a girl thought it hilarious when her friend’s phone went to a Tesco Mobile voicemail and Tesco replied to her, thinking it was pretty funny that her friends were ignoring her.
Cue the thousands of re-tweets and Tesco Mobile saw themselves thrown onto a Twitter pedestal for everyone waiting to see what would happen next. Other notable mentions go to the time they had a Twitter rap battle with the O2 Twitter account, and more recently started an online Twitter discussion with a fan and loads of other brands including Yorkshire tea and Jaffa cakes. All in all Tesco Mobile are great at their reactive work as can clearly be seen here.
3. Bodyform
Now this reactive is very often in question as to whether it was really reacting to a real member of the public or if it was all carefully orchestrated. However it initially came off as entirely reactive and proved very popular so I am still including it in the list. It all started with a post from a man named Richard who posted a comment to the Bodyform Facebook page saying that the Bodyform commercials gave off the wrong impression and that he expected a woman to be all full of joy, skydiving and surfing and excreting a blue liquid whilst at that time of the month, but instead what he found was more akin to the girl from the Exorcist.
Bodyform smartly replied with a video from their imaginary CEO who told it Richard like it is, and it again proved very popular, with it being the talk of the internet and people loving that the brand was appearing so tongue in cheek.
4. Arby’s
Arby’s ‘won’ the Social Media race at The Grammy’s this year, with a tweet related to Pharrell Williams, who turned up to the Grammy’s in an unmissable oversized Vivienne Westwood hat. This hat somewhat resembled that of the Arby’s logo and so they cleverly tweeted asking if they could have their hat back, and this led to over 80,000 retweets.
5. Nandos
Following the announcement last year of Alex Fergusons retirement as manager of Manchester Utd. Nandos came up with a brilliant idea to steal some of the spotlight; they announced #NandosFergieTime which meant that Manchester Nandos branches would be open an extra 5 minutes on May 8th (the day he resigned). The initial tweet got lots of news website coverage and was re-tweeted over 16,000 times.
6. Paddy Power
In another Fergie related stunt Paddy Power created a fake Alex Ferguson and placed it outside of Manchester United’s football ground. This stunt took place in January of this year when Man U had been suffering from poor performance on the field (especially the night before in a 3-1 defeat), possibly due to the new manager. The cheeky bookies put a waxwork Fergie in a glass box outside Old Trafford and had In case of emergency break glass, emblazoned on the side of it. They then tweeted a picture of it and got over 3,000 re-tweets.
7. Tide
The lesser well-known Super Bowl Blackout tweet, but still successful for the brand was the one from washing powder brand Tide. You know the back story, the lights went out at the 2013 Super Bowl blah blah blah… Tide responded with a tweet almost as good as Oreo’s saying they couldn’t fix the blackout but they could get your stains out, a clever quick play on words that worked well for the brand as they got over 1,000 re-tweets!
8. Snog Frozen Yoghurt
Quite recently there was a ‘social experiment’ video which started going viral, from exposure on sites like Reddit and Buzzfeed. The video led itself easily to parody as it came a across as more than a little pretentious. The first and most apt parody came from a UK fro-yo brand called Snog, and as we all know us Brits often call a kiss a snog. The video shows couples having their first ‘snog’ and yep you guessed it, they don’t actually snog, they share a cup of Snog fro-yo instead. They got 88,000 views from the stunt; not entirely a viral success compared to the original video’s 63 million views, but not bad for their first ever YouTube upload.
9. The Simpsons
Quite recently there was a large star-studded event in Hollywood, you may have heard of it, The Oscars? Anyway during said Oscars Ellen DeGeneres (who was presenting) took a selfie filled with celebrities (in part of a marketing stunt for Samsung) and it became the most re-tweeted tweet of all time. One of the most popular parody versions of said tweet was the one which came from the Simpsons team, a great push for the show, and a great animation still too! They didn’t quite beat Ellen’s 2 million re-tweets but they got a substantial 32,000!
10. Jaffa Cakes
Jaffa Cakes joins our list after their inspired online stunt which greeted our eyes only yesterday. Yesterday was the day of the 2014 budget in which George Osborne revealed that a new less counterfeit-able £1 coin would be released a few years into the future. News which we’d already found out several hours earlier on the internet. The new coin is to be 12 sided like the original threepenny piece and Jaffa Cakes decided that it was a very smart idea. They created a mock up image of a new 12-sided Jaffa Cake and said they’ll fight the counterfeit Jaffa Cake market!
