How Peloton and Oreo Mastered Reactive Marketing (and What You Can Learn From Them)

In this article:

• How Peloton bounced back with Ryan Renolds and Maximum Impact
• How Oreo turned a technical glitch into a touchdown during the SuperBowl

Reactive marketing is about immediately responding to a sudden event with a relevant campaign and benefiting from the associated interest. This quick-draw approach has many advantages — one of the most notable being its ability to bolster a brand’s connection with its existing customers.

In this article, we’ll review two of reactive marketing’s biggest hits and explain how you can adopt their winning tactics to forge a deeper bond with your clients.

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How to bounce back with class

The story

Sex and the City fans were stunned when Mr. Big suddenly died in the middle of a Peloton workout in the recent series reboot. The loss not only shook the show’s characters to the core, but it also resulted in a massive hit to the exercise equipment company’s stock, which fell nearly 12% after the episode debuted.

Fortunately, Ryan Renolds and his marketing agency Maximum Impact seized the opportunity to rewrite Peloton’s fortune, crafting a 40-second spot that the actor shared on Twitter within three days of the episode’s premiere. The stunt was an unabashed hit — earning millions of views and adding nearly a billion back to Peloton’s market cap.

The takeaways

How does one accomplish such a feat? According to Renolds, it’s all a matter of preparation: “Chris [Noth] was in right away, but it was a whirlwind. For all of us. I certainly helped secure Chris, but Maximum Effort has built itself on challenges like these so, while never ever easy, the secret is practice and not losing heart when challenges inevitably occur.”

In other words, to do something like this, you need to design your marketing machine with agility in mind. Your marketing leads must have the autonomy necessary to act quickly, and your marketing team should be well versed in putting campaigns together at a breakneck pace.

To give your team the practice it needs, consider running a few hackathon-style practice sessions built around faux news events that would pique your customers’ interest. Dry runs like these will help iron out any kinks before you try your hand at the real deal. It will also get your team acclimated to thinking from your clients’ perspective on current events in a pinch — a helpful skill come gameday.

How to turn a technical glitch into a touchdown

The story

In 2013, the second half of SuperBowl XLVII featured an unexpected twist: a 20-plus-minute blackout caused by faulty switchgear. While those watching from home waited impatiently — and those in the stands fiddled with their smartphones — the 15-person social media team at Oreo sprang into action. Within minutes, the group put together a clever little Twitter post that would become a highlight of what would come to be known as the “Blackout Bowl.”

The post was an instant success, garnering thousands of likes and retweets — and PR coverage any brand would envy. Eight years later, the tweet still has its devoted fans. It’s even inspired interest among NFT investors:

The takeaways

Like Renold’s Maximum Impact, the main reason Oreo was able to pull off this scene-stealing success was due to their design: They had a rapid response team trained to churn out a post within 10 minutes of an event.

To create this kind of turnaround speed, teams have to have their finger on the pulse of all the media their clients consume. If you want to take advantage of a story that’s grabbed hold of your customers, you can’t just know what channels they’re into — you have to live there. This level of consistent, real-time engagement  online will give you both the time and the understanding needed to make the most out of an emerging opportunity.

As Sarah Hofstetter, who helped handle Oreo’s social platforms that day, explains: “The new world order of communications today incorporates the whole of the way people are interacting with brands right now. Once the blackout happened, no one was distracted — there was nothing going on. The combination of speed and cultural relevance propelled it [to] the forefront.”