Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

@Oreo’s tweet was clever. It was the most popular tweet of the event, in fact. But for perspective, 35,000 people is only three hundredths of 1 percent of the 108.69 million people who watched the Super Bowl. “Dunk in the Dark” was dramatically outviewed by every one of the television advertisements that aired during commercial breaks. And yet. Months later that Oreo tweet, now chiseled into the stone tablets of history as the Oreo tweet, received a truckload of awards and trophies, including two Clios. Not because the ad was amazingly designed. And not because more potential Oreo buyers saw the tweet versus Oreo’s Super Bowl TV commercial. But because Oreo managed to harness momentum with it and smother the insular advertising industry with its story. The momentum started when the tech blogs caught wind of the tweet. On game day, BuzzFeed wrote about the tweet in a post that earned 400,000 views. CNET and a handful of others wrote as well. The next day, Mashable posted an article titled, “Someone Give This Oreo Employee a Raise.” That story itself was also likely viewed more times than the actual tweet. Then the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post wrote about it. Advertising Age and Adweek wrote about how everyone else was writing about it. The frenzy of media coverage resulted in what Oreo’s advertising agency, 360i, claims were 525 million earned media impressions. (“Earned media impressions” is one of those inflated figures agencies tend to use to gauge how many people...