Camden Bernatz (00:00:00) - Welcome to Brands and Campaigns, the stories and people behind clever marketing moves powered by EKR. I'm your host, Camden Bernatz, creative director and head of brand strategy at EKR. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we got him here. If you remember episode one of this podcast, I was talking to Adam about the nature of this show and the kind of things we wanted to talk about. And I just floated the idea out there like you remember that Oreo Tweet that happened during the 2013 Super Bowl? That's an example of, like, what happened during the behind the scenes like that people had to have been scrambling a little bit. That was such an interesting moment. I'd love to have someone involved to talk about that probably won't happen for a while. And I'm pleased to announce that it's happening. We got someone involved.
And so just briefly to set up again, what I'm talking about before I introduce my guest. Hopefully you've heard about it if you've been in the industry for a while, but there was a moment during the 2013 Super Bowl in which during the game, there was a blackout, there was a delay in play and obviously that is unusual and especially during the biggest game of the year, not only the biggest game from a football perspective, but the advertising game as well, right, all kinds of brands are paying lots of money for ads on the air on the airway and getting their time to shine.
And Oreo, the Oreo Twitter account, and remember this is 2013, so it hadn't been around forever that brands had been engaging on social media. Oreo quickly came out with this tweet amid the power outage when everyone's on Twitter, figuring out what's going on, when the game’s going to come back. And the tweet said “Power out? No problem.” And had an image of an Oreo just basically in a dark kind of room or a dark setting and it said “You can still dunk in the dark”. Perfectly timed to the moment very quick to respond. And a time when people were on social media trying to figure out what's going on with the blackout. Needless to say, went viral, has been referred back to written about a lot as just kind of an important moment or hallmark moment in brands utilizing social media effectively, especially for real time response to events.
To introduce our guest, we've got Mike Nuzzo here with us who was creative director, overseeing the Oreo brand at the time, the Oreo account and he's going to tell us a little bit about what happened in this moment and what we might be able to learn from it. So, Mike, thank you for joining the show.
Michael Nuzzo (00:02:23) - Camden, thanks for having me. It's the, the work that keeps on working I'll say. I just sat in on a class, a friend of mine teaches a class in advertising at the University of Colorado. So I just sat in and spoke about this. Again, I guess we're at 10 years. So it's kind of become more of a history lesson than a lesson in what we do. It was interesting to see these young minds, I sound like such an old guy but these young minds, like they had all obviously known about it because now it's almost part of curriculum.
Camden Bernatz (00:03:04) - Yeah. It's like, it's in textbooks.
Michael Nuzzo (00:03:06) - A lot of people are teaching it, actually. I was dating a girl last year and from London and she told me that her brother learned about it in school.
Camden Bernatz (00:03:18) - For real?
Michael Nuzzo (00:03:19) - Yeah. So it's just like, it just keeps popping up all over the place and there's a boon and a bust to it or a boon and a bane you could call it to the work because I'll just tell you and I know you've probably got questions and we can go through chronology of it. Probably could have saved everybody and you guys a lot of time and just sent you the link to the Digiday Oral History instead of doing this.
But I remember we were at the One Show Awards. I think it had to be over a year after. What was it? I think I can't remember that this May or April or May the following year and we had been racking up so much for it and there had just been so much conversation at that point about the brand. They were actually groans in the audience and I was like, I was looking at my CCO at the time and I was like, you go, I'm not going.
Camden Bernatz (00:04:16) - You're right though. It's a good, it's like, wow, obviously this made an impact. That's good. It's, you want people to have to be groaning, talking about it or thinking about it again. But if you are so synonymous with a certain topic that people have to groan. Like not again, that means you did something right. Right?
Michael Nuzzo (00:04:30) - Yeah. No, look, I mean at first there were a lot of detractors saying, well, it was just a tweet and then you kind of go, well, I mean, guys, we’re in creative. Isn't your job supposed to be opportunistic and find where you can make a difference and where you can show up and where you can be smart? Now, let's be realistic about this though. Like we had already been doing that. Alongside our partners at FCB during the Daily Twist take nothing away from them. I mean, you go back to the origins of what made the Daily Twist the Daily Twist and it was the work that they had done previous that we had talked to them about doing something in social with the visuals that they were doing to talk about what was going on every day. Obviously, the dailiness of it, the real-time.
And I will say too just to sidebar RTM, #RTM became almost an eye roll of hashtag after that. And kind of like every time you kind of joke about something you’d be like RTM, real-time marketing. But leading up to that moment in the Super Bowl and then for, I mean, they're still doing work like this. They've kind of slid back a little bit into the CP genus of it as far as the work that they do. But I think the digital stuff has still remained trying to do really cool things, friends over that did the like the Norway Seed Bunker, their survival, if the world goes, comes to an end Oreo is still safe.
So there's still folks doing that kind of stuff. But again, it took a lot of work to get to where we could do what we did. And again, it just comes back to, we set ourselves up to do creative, everybody. It doesn't matter where, where it was, what it was.
Camden Bernatz (00:06:33) - It wasn't like you were prepared to let this quote unquote simple thing be simple because you did all the pre, like the preparation to get to where you were prepared to do it. So talk about that a little bit if you would like, my understanding from reading, what's been put out there is you, you had kind of a task force, a team that was prepared specifically to be tweeting during the Super Bowl in some capacity. Right?
Michael Nuzzo (00:06:55) - Well, yeah, and again, I just go back to where this all started from June 25th 2012. And before that, coming up with the idea for the Daily Twist and again for that effort we worked very closely with our friends at FCB. But again, the idea was to, every morning, what's in the news and we're going to talk about that every morning. So, we had our team, they had their team, we did certain things they did certain things. But what this started to do was, started to build experience and muscle memory and like this is how we work now.
Oreo was one of, at the time, I think like 12 brands I was running in my group so I also had to have good people, really good people working because it was not something that I could be watching every single moment. But we started to build that experience of what was good and what wasn't, what did we want to talk about and what didn't we want to talk about? We had started to build this newsroom out here. I mean, it got to the point where I had almost three teams working. I will call it around the clock, but it wouldn't, they weren't there at two o'clock in the morning. But if something happened at two o'clock in the morning by six, there was emails or texts going around.
That went on from June 25th for 100 days, whatever that turns into. I think it was sometime in August or September. I can't do my math. Then we were doing other stuff, there's other amazing work that, like honestly some of my favorite Oreo stuff is not the Daily Twist and not the tweet, to be honest, maybe that's because I just talk about it so much. But maybe that's a podcast for another day, the whole ecosystem of Oreo for that time. But yeah, leading up to the Super Bowl, the client had invested, everyone talks about billions of impressions, no money spent. Well, but that's not entirely true because there was a whole lot of money spent leading up to that. Without that, look, you can get lucky, of course you can get lucky. But there was already eyes on us. That put all the eyes on us, but there are a lot of eyes on us already. I mean the first post from the Daily Twist the Rainbow Cookie, that set the world on fire and that led into what we could do then boom.
I mean, I think there was an article or a cover of either one of the trades that said what's Oreo going to do next? Better than that. Like, I mean, you want to talk about pressure but you also want to talk about, oh, wow, guys, we really were on to something here. So that led us into that night and prepping for that night and knowing what was going on and we had a lot of things prepared. We knew Beyonce was doing half time and we had stuff prepared for who is going to win and who wasn't going to win and yeah, all that kind of stuff. Always on the back of our minds thinking of, hey, if something happens, but there's so much going on, there's so much that people are paying attention to, we weren't really thinking of being reactive. We were just thinking of like doing our jobs and doing well and having good creative and having a solid night.
We had an agency there, we had partner agencies there or media, there was a rep or two from our media company and I think somebody from PR. I can’t remember the names of the agencies at this point elude me because I'm getting older and this was 10 years ago. Yeah, it’s been a while. And we also had the client in the room, a client that was excited to do things. Again, when you talk about exercising your muscle memory to take more risks, we had these kinds of clients in the room. So when that presented itself really the only risk and I say this and it's interesting that you said, we got it up quick. I would put “quick” in quotes. We were actually not the first to market on purpose. We had the tweet done in 30 seconds like legit 30 seconds, it was done. That's a testament to –
Camden Bernatz (00:11:25) - Did you have the visual ready to go for something or did you like --?
Michael Nuzzo (00:11:29) - We didn't. It got put together really quick.
Camden Bernatz (00:11:33) - It's something very simple but like –
Michael Nuzzo (00:11:36) - Yeah, I think my art director Roberto Salas was already working on something that was blacked out.
Camden Bernatz (00:11:43) - Put a black gradient in there.
Michael Nuzzo (00:11:43) - Yeah. And then I was actually there was already emails and things going around like the minute it popped off. I am not even kidding. I was sitting in a swivel chair and not petting a cat or I was sitting in a swivel chair in front of the screen and I had a few beers and I had a few when I was still a carnivore eating a pulled pork sandwich. As soon as it blinked off, I spun around and I looked, and I was like, we should probably do something. Then we spit out of line and my copywriter, Nick Penny Topolus, Nick and Rob, by the way, have gone on to incredible careers and we put that thing together in 30 seconds and then we sat on it because we wanted to make sure, like, honestly, like a busload of orphans didn't crash into a –
Camden Bernatz (00:12:39) - Like a terrorist attack or something.
Michael Nuzzo (00:12:42) - No, and it goes back to being careful of what you're going to do. I remember my client, she's great. I will not mention her name in case she doesn't want to be mentioned. But she's awesome. I'm still close friends with her. She was so excited afterwards. She was like, what are we going to do next? And it was cliche, but I said to her, no, what are we not going to do next? Because everybody did everything next. Everybody did everything next. And we really chose our spots. I mean, it was so good I don't know I would never again to this day, I would never duplicate that. I mean, we did some amazing work after that for some other brands because of the work that we did on Oreo. I mean, the doors flew open and we had everybody knocking on our door literally saying we want what Oreo has. Like those words came out of multiple mouths.
Camden Bernatz (00:13:43) - Wow. So I, that, that makes me think about like you mentioned earlier, like people, you got brought up and people, there was kind of a groan like all this again. I wasn't there obviously in all of their minds, but I imagine what happens is I haven't groaned at it. Obviously, I'm very interested and I asked you to be here, but I think where maybe some of that groaning comes from is the people who say I want what Oreo have and think that what you had was just perfectly duplicable. Is that a word like, repeatable? I think what you mentioned, like the preparation and being ready to respond to something, that is doable. You can put that effort and have process in place.
Michael Nuzzo (00:14:19) - But the work's got to be good, right? Because like, again, I'm not going to mention the brand but there were two or three, maybe even four posts that went up before. We weren't the only news room in town. People had learned either from us or they were starting at the same time that we were starting to do that kind of work in social. Again, it's 2012, 2013, Facebook and Twitter had been around, but they weren't really, I mean, I think we were still getting out of gated Facebook apps.
Camden Bernatz (00:14:52) - Especially had not yet utilized it well.
Michael Nuzzo (00:14:55) - No, they hadn't utilized it well. And we had a, one of the other brands that went up before us was kind of like if you had our LED lights that we have on our cars, you could see the game, no problem. And it was just kind of like, wow, yeah, you're trying to literally sell a product here. We were just trying to sell, we were selling an experience and look that's what we did from the minute we flipped the switch on 100 years from twist lick dunk with grandma and grandpa, which is still do, and we did. But we had the whole point was, hey, we're losing kids from 13, 14, 15 years old because they're not going out buying Oreos and they don't buy them and tell their parents. But where are they? They're in college eating Doritos. Well, if you get the munchies, you could eat us too.
So we made that conscious decision to start to flip the switch, especially in social, to something like that and it paid off.
Camden Bernatz (00:16:05) - Yeah. Well, yeah and especially being the Super Bowl, it's you is this food snacky kind of item was really, really good fit for that kind of moment to capitalize. LED light, it's irrelevant to the game.
Michael Nuzzo (00:16:16) - It's irrelevant. So to finish that point I thought I was making and I drifted off. We were selling the brand and we continued to sell the brand, not sleeves of cookies. You could argue that we turned Oreo into one of the bigger entertainment companies in the world for 2, 3 years. Everything we were doing was about entertaining our client, not our client, our market or at least a segment of our market, that segment that was now older TikTokers or they were moving into Snap at the time and learning how to use social in a totally different way.
Camden Bernatz (00:17:02) - Okay, so the tweet goes out right? When you do decide to do it and you're monitoring what's, what's the room like? What comes next?
Michael Nuzzo (00:17:11) - Oh, counting. I mean, we were counting retweets. I mean, it was like hitting send, I mean, we weren't nervous about hitting send. We'd hit send so many times on good stuff. We knew we had something, we just didn't know we had that and when you think about we had 15,000 and change retweets by, I don't know the end of the game, when you think about that being a bar for Twitter back in the day, it was literally like we broke. And yeah, we ended up actually in Twitter's IPO should we be calling it X? I'll call it Twitter.
Camden Bernatz (00:17:51) - Yeah, it was Twitter back then. Yeah.
Michael Nuzzo (00:17:54) - We'll call it Twitter. We're actually in their IPO because of that work because they just showed what the power of Twitter can do for brands. Then I don't know if it was a year or maybe less than a year, I can't, again, I can't think of the year specifically. But the next one that kind of shook the foundations was the Ellen picture for Samsung. Everyone, you remember that when she did the selfie at was it the Oscars or something? I guess it was the Oscars. And everybody was in it like Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Cooper –
Camden Bernatz (00:18:32) - Yeah, that was like the most liked one for a while, right?
Michael Nuzzo (00:18:35) - I mean, I think it got hundreds of thousands at that point. The question everybody was asking is like, was Ellen doing it or was it for Samsung? And ultimately it was for Samsung. But yeah, so we know, 15 and change hit a bar. So it was really just sitting there counting and then excitement and we had to go through the process with legal to make sure that everything was cool. And again, waiting to hear the news, we had our every news channel possible we're listening to find out if we could get confirmation on what it was. There was, if nobody was dead honestly, like everybody was okay. Pop the tweet up.
Camden Bernatz (00:19:20) - So was there, I'm very familiar with the treat tweet itself but with all the different interactions afterward, was there comment management? With you engaging with people afterward, or response to it or you just kind of let it let it marinate?
Michael Nuzzo (00:19:32) - To be honest, Camden, I can't remember exactly. We just, we didn't have to do anything. There was so much pick up, like, literally so much pick up from it. Like, it was probably as big, if not bigger than Rainbow Cookie for Daily Twists. I mean, strangely enough because, that it was the Super Bowl, because of what it did.
Camden Bernatz (00:19:57) - That's the thing. Yeah, it'd be a big deal no matter what, but you're doing it during the game when people paid millions of dollars for a 30-second ad that didn't get talked as much as your tweet.
Michael Nuzzo (00:20:06) - And that was the story and that was truly the story and then you go back to like, okay, yeah, but we set ourselves up for that. A lot of people were involved setting ourselves up for that from media, from PR, from FCB, from our team. It's a lot of people at work to get to that point in time to be read.
Camden Bernatz (00:20:29) - Yep. So we talked about before how people like other people tried to, they commented and were saying things during the game, it didn't get as big. Along the same lines as just brains and social media with how it's advanced where we're at now, do you think if this tweet happened today, would it do the same thing?
Michael Nuzzo (00:20:50) - No, it wouldn't that nobody wants to hear from brands anymore on Twitter and Twitter is, I mean, we'll start with Twitter, but I would say social in general and this is, look, this is my opinion now having been in the space for over a decade and doing some really big work in the space in over a decade and seeing big work and appreciating it and seeing what works with us. I don't know, like, I couldn't say for sure. No, but I would gamble. No, because I think we've gotten past brands engaging in things that seem, it all seems contrived now.
Camden Bernatz (00:21:33) - People understand that there's the people behind the scenes, kind of like your team was. We shouldn't make it less entertaining but like we all kind of know, oh, this was planned, this is advertising still, they still see it as that as opposed to engagement. Right?
Michael Nuzzo (00:21:45) - Yeah. And obviously, you get a lot of detractors from our industry. You know, like everybody's a hater unless you work on it or you hate everything. Right? That's not entirely true. I mean, I love so much work but like –
Camden Bernatz (00:21:58) - If it's not your work, you hate it.
Michael Nuzzo (00:21:59) - If it's not your work, you hate it. You find reasons that it was stupid or we shouldn't have they shouldn't have done that or. But no, I do think that the way things are now, it's not a space for brands to be cute like that. I mean, you still have brands doing their thing. I don't even know – I honestly, I dumped off of Twitter right before the purchase. It's just such a toxic political environment right now. There's no fun to it anymore. If you go to Instagram, nobody wants to see brands. Everybody wants to see cats and Lord of the Ring memes and the dog, the driving dog on a green screen. It's all about what humans do and the things that we do and how everybody is an advertiser now, everybody is a creative. Probably nobody, none of the memes that we see none of the things that we see on Instagram or Twitter or whatever are created by folks like us. Everybody's got a forum now. So it's kind of scary for us when you think about it.
Camden Bernatz (00:23:07) - Yeah. And how fastly whatever was trending, the new thing trends tomorrow like that things don't last a week.
Michael Nuzzo (00:23:13) - Nothing lasts. That's a great point Camden, nothing lasts. If you get something to last a week, it's like it should be probably in the Hall of Fame. Yeah. But now you've got campaigns that last, that they can keep bringing out there that people know, like, follow the taste the rainbow. I don't care how tired some of us in the business think it is. I don't. Look, I think they keep doing the right thing or you get Brian Cox to do – but there's, obviously celebrity is important now.
I mean, it's kind of like the ‘80s, I feel like when you were like, is that Gene Hackman doing the voice overs? Now, you've got people back in doing the voiceover of everything. So there's the game. I just don't think brands can do the kinds of things that we do with, that we did with that kind of success. Wendy's started doing it really well. Obviously Burger King.
Camden Bernatz (00:24:06) - That's what I was going to say. This reminds me of a different usage of it. But another kind of owning of a moment or a style, I guess, in Twitter is Wendy's Twitter and just like roasting people, right? And people have tried to kind of copy that.
Michael Nuzzo (00:24:17) - Do know, had their moment and then you had like the Little Debbies at Moon Pie. It was like, wow. But again, in that time, like Little Debbies at Moon Pie, like, but when they can now have a forum that people go, that's amazing. Like, I mean, RIP Tumblr, but like Denny's Tumblr won awards because it was so good. Denny's. So I think kind of like, again, and I’ll probably get eviscerated for saying things like what I'm about to say, but I think the golden age of social for that is over. I just don't know if it can be used like that anymore where people would care. It's not that the work wouldn't be good. But would you be able to engage the same kind of people that you're looking for? I don't think so because that range of folks has either ranged out or they're ranged into TikTok and they care more about celebrity and they care more about other kinds of things than what a brand has to say.
Camden Bernatz (00:25:24) - I feel like this is a little bit off-topic. Social media, because of experiences like Oreo, which was a good usage, but, the downside is that people started to see the economic value of social media and if not just – what I'm saying is it became even for the non-brand, just the individual, it didn't become just social, it became transactional where it's I'm trying to promote something or I'm trying to gain followers or I'm trying to become – Everyone's trying to put their stuff out there more than they're actually consuming what else is out there. It's all about putting their own stuff out there.
Michael Nuzzo (00:25:55) - Well, you make a really good point and I would use the example just from a personal experience when we picked up HBO after all the Oreo stuff. I'm going to sound like a total douchebag with the story. But I was literally sitting on a beach in Cannes picking up awards for Oreo. And I got a call from one of my account directors and we hopped on. I'm going to say I'm on a date myself and we hopped on Skype and, frosé in hand, he was like, hey, HBO just called, they have this little brief. I'm going to tell you now it's not that exciting. What are your thoughts? I'm like, it's HBO. Let's do it.
I won't get into the story. But ultimately, that led to 360I and my team launching Game of Thrones for however many seasons, six seasons. The Leftovers, True Detectives, all those shows. But what those social engagements in perfect word, engagement, what that social needed to be was engaging. It wasn't just about, I'm going to put this post up there, which is really what we did with Oreo. We had some things like whether it was snack hacks or some other stuff where it was a little transactional, like our snack hacks ideas got so like they were fake, but they got so much popularity and people love them. We made them like physical things and we gave them away for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
But really, Oreo was kind of a one-way conversation. HBO became more of a two-way conversation. We put things out there, whether it was Roast Joffrey, where we were asking people to basically roast the internet's most hated villain in a kind of online version of a Comedy Central roast and unsolicited. We had celebrities and brand, we had everybody engaging with us. For there, whether it was 15 minutes of fame or other brands exposure, they wanted to use that platform for exposure. So there was a two way conversation and then we had to come up with another idea of how to use social in new ways. So we gamified Twitter and using retweets and likes and stuff as like almost buttons on a PlayStation joystick or something for people to try and catch a dragon.
So even a year or a year and a half or so beyond everything we were doing for him and we're still working on Oreo overlapping with HBO. You saw the evolution of where social needed to go. Obviously, plenty of people were still just doing static posts and we were and videos and vines and all that kind of stuff. But you had to have more of a value exchange or 15 minutes of fame or I need to have fun or I want to press this or I want something to happen or I want a reaction or something like that.
Camden Bernatz (00:28:57) - What you said right there, provide value is the key but it doesn't have to necessarily be crazy unusual value. Like the Oreo Tweet provided a moment of like, oh like just kind of a little chuckle. That's valuable and that's enough. Like I already share that. If you're just asking for stuff or do buy one, get one stuff, like your brand, if there is any life on Twitter for brands or on social media or anything like that, it's definitely not doing that, right? It's not just say, hey, we're still here in your way. Please buy from us on this platform as well.
Michael Nuzzo (00:29:29) - Because Oreo is an, honestly, to this day, it's still a universally loved brand. I mean, everybody loves Oreo cookies. I mean, maybe you're not an Oreo cookie eater but like you're not going to sit there and go oh that I don't know what they're all about or I didn't see those as I was a kid. So when you have that kind of brand, you already got a little bit of that love locked in, you're just trying to drag it out. But like –
Camden Bernatz (00:29:51) - It’s a fun product.
Michael Nuzzo (00:29:52) - Yeah, but for that night when you're also right and I do think that there was something to that because we had, I think the brand categories where we had a soup, we had a car, and I think we had, I would say nowadays probably insurance would play better because all the insurance companies, I could argue that some of them are doing really, really good work. Some of them are doing terrible work, but some of them are really doing good work. I think those were like the categories. So it wasn't like a very exciting categories of auto soup.
Camden Bernatz (00:30:28) - I have to ask, were there Oreos in the room?
Michael Nuzzo (00:30:34) - Honestly, there were always Oreos in the room but it's not like jelly beans at a Van Halen concert like, right, they weren't like only the green jelly. We, we just couldn't eat them anymore. They were definitely folks that were love the free Oreos. But, and I loved Oreos too, but it got to the point where I was like, I can't do any more.
Camden Bernatz (00:30:56) - Makes sense. Well, you've covered a lot of great insights, especially as someone who has been involved with various brands utilizing social media specifically in various ways, kind of as, as a summary looking back on the last 10 years and all the conversations you've been giving about this event. Is there any main like takeaways or insights or even like warnings or anything that if you were, what's kind of your, like, your sendoff message for anybody who's looking at this and trying to, like, learn from it, I guess?
Michael Nuzzo (00:31:26) - Well, look, I think we went over a bunch of that stuff. I think the strategy from the beginning really led to this. Right? And it was like, let's not do the same old stuff for the same old target, right? Millennials were like kind of the word of the day. Now, it's Gen Z and Gen Zennials and whatever you want to call them now. But millennials were the word of the day and they simply weren't responding to the work at the time. Look, I was at Razorfish when this business was put into review and what they wanted was so not interesting, what the client wanted at the time was kind of like this is not going to be good work. They actually, we let it go out the door. Little did I know six months later, I go to 360I and then 3 months, 6 months after getting a 360I, my CEO came to me and said, hey, we need to fix this brand.
But I do think having good minds and clients that are willing to take risks and we certainly had that. We certainly had that. I could get into that with the twist and that's where it really all started for this. But, like you have to have solid strategy and differentiating strategy and clients that are willing to do the work because you could have the best work in the world. If you don't have a client that's going to bring it to life, you've seen work either get killed or death by a thousand cuts or the end product looks nothing like what it did from the beginning.
I mean, we had very, very little work that went out the door that was push back killed from when we started to when I left that business. I rolled off the Oreo business in, at the end of ‘15 and then I moved to LA and I opened our office out there. So I was really handling all west coast business at the time. But again to learn from it, I guess, don't be afraid to do work that you, that you think feels, I don't know small because it's not. If it's good, it's good. It doesn't matter where it is, where it lives, how big it is. You don't have to spend a million dollars to make good work. That's been proven more probably in the last 10 years than in the last 100 in our business.
The platform helps but the days of a client saying make me a viral video because if you put it on the internet, everyone's going to share it, which isn't true as we know, it's over. But the platform is still powerful if you do the right kind of work.
Camden Bernatz (00:34:11) - Great. Well, yeah, great case study of knowing your audience knowing where they're at, being prepared to respond. Like all that stuff came together in this little magic moment obviously. Yeah, it's easier again, I'm repeating myself a little bit. But what I don't want people to take away from this tweet. And is that okay, if I do the exact same thing about the exact same result, like you have to be unique, you have to know how things have changed and that's what that was. What gets the groans is that, oh, well, I'm just going to tweet about whatever’s happening in the news right now. And therefore people are going to go viral like you have to capture lightning in a bottle with some preparation to, you have a big enough bottle to catch it, so to speak.
Michael Nuzzo (00:34:55) - Yeah, I would say that these days it's also about how provocative can you be without getting canceled.
Camden Bernatz (00:35:00) - That's true.
Michael Nuzzo (00:35:01) - It really is, there's something to that because there is. You mentioned it, you hit the nail on the head earlier when you said, if things last a day, you're lucky because everybody's looking for the next thing so you have to really find a way to get their attention and it's difficult.
Camden Bernatz (00:35:22) - A lot of what does go viral or last, a little bit related to brands is created by the customer, not the brand. Like the McDonald Grimace Shakes and those things that were going around.
Michael Nuzzo (00:35:34) - 100%.
Camden Bernatz (00:35:35) - The Stanley Cup, have you seen that one in the car that burned down?
Michael Nuzzo (00:35:38) - Well, I go back to, I don't know if you remember, Is it Jack Links? Who's the Bigfoot? What brand was it? Is it Jack Links? I can't remember. It's so many jerky brands.
Camden Bernatz (00:35:54) - That sounds right to me.
Michael Nuzzo (00:35:55) - But I remember when somebody, this is going back to jeez, my (00:36:01) so this is like in 2009, 2010, maybe a little later. Somebody took Sasquatch and started putting it into like backgrounds and like enlarging it and they basically hijacked it. When you're a brand and we've talked about this literally in meetings going, now, if we can get the customer to hijack this that's your win, right? That's your win. Where we don't have to keep creating contrived content or produce content that we just keep shoving in their face. If we can let them make something out of this…
Camden Bernatz (00:36:35) - Because then it's entertainment. It's not advertising, it is, functions as advertising, but it's not coming from you.
Michael Nuzzo (00:36:43) - I worked on Diageo too and anybody listening to this or yourself, anybody's worked on spirits, to tell you it's one of the hardest segments to get great work done. And not to say there hasn't been a lot of great work, but it's tough. We want it. Smirnoff was one of the brands I ran and we tried to bring icing back so many times because it was a consumer -- when you ice somebody, it's not meant to be a good thing. But we're like, hey, maybe we could turn this around and but it's, you're right, it's those moments that become like these cultural things. Where right now Smirnoff is known for icing somebody probably more than anything else.
Camden Bernatz (00:37:28) - Wow. Yeah. The psychology of it. Well, thank you again for being here and talking about this and talking about something you talked about before. We know it's not the first time but we love to get behind the scenes here. For anybody who wants to kind of follow what you're up to work you're doing, get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Michael Nuzzo (00:37:48) - I mean, they could just look me up on LinkedIn. That's always the easiest. My book is, I'm actually working on the brand side now. I left agency a couple of years ago. Again, as I get up there in years I have sort of different goals. But I still, I've got a couple of businesses on the side. But if yeah, my LinkedIn and also just my name .com michaelnuzzo.com has this work and a lot of other Oreo work and HBO stuff and a lot of stuff that I've done.
Camden Bernatz (00:38:21) - I hope it's not insulting to have you on from one tweet. I know we love to have you back. You've done lots of great stuff one time. But this is, this is a good story.
Michael Nuzzo (00:38:29) - No. It’s a great story and it's a big story. So like if it was just about me coming in here and saying, yeah, we got into a room and we made a tweet that we got lucky, that would be one thing. But there's a longer head and a longer tail to this story. 360I did a lot of great things and I can attribute a lot of the work that came after and the growth of that business and the growth of that company to the work that we did on that brand. So, I appreciate you saying that, I am definitely not -- I definitely don't feel any way about it. I do love talking about it. It's a really great story and there were a lot of good people involved and this is your Bellini, right? This is my Bellini. Perfect.
Camden Bernatz (00:39:22) - And we specifically did want you on because some who was involved in the room, like we could go find someone from Oreo maybe. But like they weren't necessarily the ones who helped the sausage get made. And so that's the insight we wanted.
Michael Nuzzo (00:39:33) - So, there was 15 people in the room between creative and client and other agencies and stuff like that. But I think over the last 10 years of my life, I've gone to conferences and talks and everything and the folks that continue to say, they were in the room, there's 60 people in the room now Camden, there's 60 people in the room. There's 15 people that wrote it. There's 10 people that designed it. It's one of those things where you just kind of smile. You know who was there and they know who was there and it's fine.
Camden Bernatz (00:40:07) - We appreciate that. So yeah, check out Mike's stuff, his website and follow him, he's got lots of good stuff he has done and I'm sure more good stuff to come. And if you've enjoyed this episode or any of the episodes to listen to, we appreciate you to subscribe as always, leave us a five star review, maybe share it with someone. And we look forward to having more conversations with people like Mike and campaigns and brands that have some good behind the scenes stories. So join us for the next episode, we'll see you next time.
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