Social media lessons from Oscars’ real-time marketing

We all have Oreo to thank. The cookie brand had a big win on Super Bowl Sunday with its post about the power outage at the Superdome. That prompted a series of articles and calls to action around creating a “newsroom” feel to marketing, but it may have backfired during Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony.

Too many brands to count hopped on the bandwagon, and the result may have turned many people away from social media marketing.

What fans and followers saw were brands being on social media just to be on social media. It appeared little thought was put behind why certain brands were creating real-time assets. Much more thought was put into being clever on the fly for the sake of being among many who were trying to be clever on the fly.

The result was a conversation around the hashtag #oscarsrtm—as in, Oscars real-time marketing. Several marketers, for instance, celebrated U.S. Cellular’s use of Twitter, while others on Twitter (including marketers and regular consumers) thought otherwise.