Lunchtime Links: Recreating a Super Bowl Slam Dunk

Last Super Bowl, Oreo scored a big brand victory on Twitter. This year, many brands are hoping to follow suit. Also: Is your nonprofit job feeling like Groundhog Day these days? These tips might help.

Apologies for starting a news piece with a bit of personal opinion, but Oreos are tasty enough to market themselves.

Still, there’s always room for smart marketing, as the team behind the cookie brand learned a year ago. Now everyone’s trying to steal their idea.

A Super Bowl marketing primer in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC  (opens in a new tab)

— OREO Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013  (opens in a new tab)

Brands at the ready: One year ago, Oreo changed the world of advertising with a single tweet. Just 10 minutes after the lights went out in New Orleans’ Superdome during last year’s Super Bowl, the cookie brand scored a touchdown with a well-timed image that tallied more than 15,000 retweets and generated the kind of buzz that many companies spend millions trying to create. (Yahoo TV goes so far  (opens in a new tab) as to call it the social media equivalent of Apple’s “1984” commercial.) So it’s no surprise that brands left and right are looking to recapture that lightning in a bottle during this year’s Broncos/Seahawks matchup at MetLife Stadium. AdWeek has a list of brands  (opens in a new tab) hoping to score big with the approach—including the City of Omaha, which won accolades of its own after jumping on Peyton Manning’s play-calling a couple of weeks ago. And in case you’re convinced this is a passing fad, maybe not—Arby’s did even better than Oreo less than a week ago with a well-timed Grammys tweet.

Speaking of ads … You won’t know the score of the game until Sunday night, but there’s nothing holding you back from seeing all of the Super Bowl ads right now. Fast Company has a full list  (opens in a new tab), featuring such star turns as The Muppets (getting a little help from Terry Crews to sell the Toyota Highlander), Laurence Fishburne (reprising his role as Morpheus from The Matrix for Kia), and the dads from Full House (selling Greek yogurt for Dannon). Perhaps the most interesting departure ad-wise, however, comes from Axe Body Spray, which eschews its traditional bro-friendly marketing flavor for something much more dramatic and romantic (shown above). Think you can borrow anything from these ads?

The other big thing happening on Sunday: Time to channel your inner Bill Murray. Sunday is Groundhog Day, which may have the honor of being the minor holiday that spawned the best movie  (opens in a new tab). But if you find yourself living in a vortex of wasted time and repeated actions like Phil Connors, you may want to check out the Nonprofit Marketing Blog‘s advice  (opens in a new tab) on how to free yourself. If your newsletter is lacking good content, Network for Good’s Liz Ragland writes, focus on building a strong editorial calendar and giving your content a rewrite. “Your messaging should be relevant to your readers, interesting enough to share with a friend, and strategically distributed,” she writes. (Side note: If you’re looking for some life advice from Murray, be sure to check his recent Reddit Q&A session  (opens in a new tab).)

Any strategies you have for getting out of a rut? Tell us about them in the comments.

(via Oreo’s Twitter page)