Disruptive Marketing: Dominate the Dialogue

Disruptive marketing generates urgency for a particular product or service, and it hits you when you least suspect it. It uses methods that aren’t tried and true to demand your attention and convince you that you need something…even when you don’t know it.

Think of a moment when you were working at your desk; you’re elbows deep in a project when out of the blue someone comes around with an urgent request. What happens?

Everything shifts. Your focus shifts to this new project, as do your priorities. You change direction almost immediately, and the project that seemed so important moments ago is now on hold for the moment.

An often-cited example is Oreo’s You Can Still Dunk in the Dark tweet during Super Bowl XLVII in 2013. When a blackout left the game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens in the dark, more than 100 million viewers took to social media to get information, express frustration, make jokes, or just check their feeds. Oreo’s marketing agency tweeted the brilliant graphic, immediately making the cookie a part of the event’s dialogue.

In a matter of minutes, that simple joke got thousands of retweets and was shared thousands of times more on Facebook, garnering some 525 million earned media impressions. For those of you keeping score, that’s five times the number of viewers. Talk about a response from your audience!

Think about that for a second. During a game where a 30-second spot cost $4,000,000 (which was too rich for GM’s blood), a cookie company got the same amount of, if not more, visibility and interaction for a fraction of the cost. What more could a 15-member social media team watching the game ask for?

That, in essence, is disruptive marketing. Oreo got its product engaged in a conversation that it seemingly had nothing to do with using nontraditional means, and completely undercut its competition with regard to cost and labor. By responding immediately to something a massive target audience was already talking about, they created something meaningful that had significant, lasting impact.

But that doesn’t happen without a social media team at the ready with eyes peeled and ears open for that window of opportunity. PALO Creative has a full creative staff wired into social media on all fronts, and we aren’t afraid to go guerilla. Contact us today and ask about our social media plans.