I couldn’t tell you how many players are on a football team, but I love the Super Bowl. It’s such a fun industry for marketing. I’ll be live LinkedIn-ing and tweeting analysis of the ads during the game, so follow me over there if you wanna chat!

But until then, let’s talk about:

• Why brands without Super Bowl ads shouldn’t Super Bowl tweet

• My FREE brand voice workshop!

• Duolingo’s savage real-time takedown tweet

Join my FREE brand voice workshop!

I love giving out free tools to marketers who wanna learn, so when Semrush asked me to partner on a project, it was an immediate yes.

Introducing Master Your Brand Voice: Workshop with Jack Appleby!

You’ll get the voice & tone exercises I’ve used with some of the biggest brands in the world, all drilled down so you can try them for yourself & your brands! The workshop includes: 

• A downloadable workbook with 10 brand voice exercises + templates

• Real examples from my career as I walk you through the process

• A digital certification you can add to your LinkedIn!

Head right to this link to grab the full workshop—I can’t wait to hear what you think of The Doppelganger, The 12 Brand Archetypes, and all the other exercises in there.

How Oreo ruined Super Bowl Social Media (and why marketers should take the day off)

One little tweet ruined my life… okay, that’s dramatic, but it did ruin my buffalo wing consumption for a few years.

That damn little sandwich cookie just had to toss up content during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout, inventing real-time social media marketing in the process and costing our industry millions of dollars in wild goose chases while stealing a great day off from marketers.

The History

Some quick background since the inciting Oreo was somehow 12 years ago.

There was a mid-game partial blackout during Super Bowl XVII, where play suspended for 34 minutes until the power got back to full strength. During that window, Oreo tossed up this tweet:

The tweet became a phenomenon in marketing. Casual tweeters always live tweeted events, but we’d never seen brands make content to reflect real-time moments. The novelty worked in that moment, earning bunches of engagements. I remember when it happened! It was a lightbulb moment for many of us, and I really loved it at the time.

But the halo effect over the next decade made me wanna eat said lightbulb.

Introducing the expectation to be Chronically Online

You’ve seen the ridiculous lines in social media job descriptions.

We’re looking for someone who lives and breathes the internet! Social Media never sleeps! Are you constantly online?

Social media should sleep. We’re marketers, not ER nurses. But FOMO towards real-time marketing perpetuated the expectation that we always know everything online always in case whoever signs our paychecks could benefit from a 9:37 pm PST tweet that ever-so-slightly related to our brands.

Remember that viral TikTok where the guy skateboarded to Fleetwood Mac while drinking Ocean Spray? I scrolled Marketing Twitter that week as social media managers loudly cried “When is Ocean Spray gonna hop on this?!?!”

The TikTok got 95 million views. The brand didn’t need to instantly react to win. That’s why they bought the guy a truck a week or two later, and enjoyed virality all over again. But now we as social media marketers have trained ourselves that IT’S AN EMERGENCY, WE MUST REACT IMMEDIATELY, when no, we can relax and participate when it makes sense for us.

Enter The Real-Time War Room: the biggest waste of $$$

It’s commonplace for brands and ad agencies to gather the troops in a “War Room” for major campaign moments. When I worked at Beats By Dre, we had new TV ads launch during Warriors vs. Cavs NBA Finals, with Beats athletes on both teams—that meant late night pizza and watching the entire NBA Finals together at the office. And that made sense—millions upon millions went into the campaign.

But Oreo caused War Rooms to break out for all cultural moments, including events where the brands didn’t have any advertising. I remember being asked to sit in a War Room for the Grammy’s, for a brand that didn’t even have cultural ties to the moment. But the new expectation was we needed to make content for any major televised event. Suffice it to say, none of our lame attempts at culture-jacking produced meaningful results, and as the ~agency partner~, you can bet we charged an ungodly sum of money to staff that war room.

You want your brandstagram to compete with Super Bowl ads?

The Super Bowl is the Super Bowl of Advertising. Brands spent $7 million a pop for to get their commercials in the game this year, and every one of those brands have massive campaigns extending their Super Bowl spots through social media and other avenues.

…but you, a brand without a Super Bowl commercial, want to have Super Bowl content and coverage… during the most advertising-saturated moment of the entire year?

You’re a rubber ducky against a tidal wave.

Your content isn’t going to generate performance when competing against unlimited-budget brands and general Super Bowl conversation. You’re gonna get buried. Those couple organic posts and tweets aren’t going to change your brand’s life.

Marketers learn more by watching The Super Bowl than trying to win it without resources

I got big news for ya, brands and agencies: The Super Bowl is a sneaky educational field trip for your marketers. Everyone watches Super Bowl commercials, and every marketer I know talks about them. If you give your team the day off, they’re actually gonna learn in the process! Super Bowl ad debate is the easiest critical thinking exercise you could offer your marketing team.

So give your team the day off. Hell, throw them a gift card for wings.

Duolingo’s savage real-time takedown

No one’s better at real-time marketing than that green owl. Sure, I think they take it too far sometimes, but they really do understand how to turn culture into viral content.

When the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Doncic to the Lakers this week (which is still insane, but this isn’t a basketball newsletter), it was as much of a sports monoculture moment as the Tyson / Paul fight.

So what did Duolingo do? Throw together a screenshot from their app with one emoji, earning over 10 million views from a tweet that cost them nothing.

Click the image below to watch my breakdown, and follow my new Instagram account for daily marketing + social content!