Despite my hatred of The Grammy’s, I still set aside time to watch it once a year. While I knew that Twitter was going to ruin the winners for me, I was still actively tweeting and watching what others were saying. This tweet stood out to me:

I suppose I likely got my hopes up thinking that Oreo would have another Superbowl hit, but you never know! Unfortunately I had an hour to wait (this tweet was referring to the Grammy’s on the East Coast, and we all know that the Grammy’s are tape delayed for the rest of us).

Then I saw the commercial. It was completely underwhelming and that previous tweet confused me – why would you congratulate someone over that? Then I remembered the hashtag at the end, so I searched it on Twitter:

The ‘People’ section is what really confused me. Why was Chirpify mentioned here? What did they have to do with this Oreo campaign because they (as far as I was aware) were a company that facilitated social payments. I had originally started following them when they were running a deal for independent bands who signed up for Chirpify as they could offer their CD’s for sale on Twitter and all a fan had to do was tweet with a hashtag. Similar to the @TweetaCoffee that Starbucks is doing now. Brilliant – right?

So again, I ask, why are they involved with this Oreo hashtag? Seems like Oreo would have paid for a promoted tweet on the #sendmeoreo hashtag to give some instruction, or to explain the collaboration with Chirpify, but there was nothing. So I tweeted:

Then I got this reply:

Doesn’t really explain much, but go to this link…right? After clicking the link I get to this page:

Which has been overwhelmed as this page was broken for at least 30 minutes (why I tried so long, I don’t know…call me curious):

Then I wonder if maybe I missed a tweet from Oreo that will explain this whole thing and why I should care. So I go back to Oreo’s twitter page:

No tweets for 2 days! Except replies spam to people:
#holyspambatman!

Then I think to myself, maybe B. Bonin Bough tweeted something else about this campaign?

Nope. Nothing beyond praises (and the random tweet TO Oreo that seems to imply he doesn’t understand Twitter, or he only wanted to reach those followers that overlap. But I digress).

Finally the website works and I’m able to get past that first page:

I understand this is my shipping address and the hashtag is #sendmeoreo, so I would assume that by filling this out, I am going to receive some Oreo’s, but what kind? Are they special ones? Seems like a lot of steps to go through (and give them my information) without finding out why I’m doing it! I ended up filling the form out (I’m too curious for my own good sometimes) and finally get to a page with rules Side note: is that legal to have rules AFTER you fill out the information?? I didn’t see a link to them prior to entering my information.

The rules gave a little more insight into the campaign. The first 20,000 people to tweet with the hashtag #sendmeoreo have the chance to receive the link to enter their information to receive a package of Oreo’s new flavors.

Since the hashtag was trending nationally on Twitter:

You’d think that they reached that 20,000 pretty quickly. I did a quick search on Topsy, and within a few hours of seeing the commercial, there had only been 8,735 #sendmeoreo tweets.

I could have dived deeper in the data on Topsy to see how many of those were from the @Oreo twitter handle, but let’s just assume that roughly half were from Oreo, as I received 2 replies after my #sendmeoreo tweets. Surprised that 4,000 (or 8,000 I suppose) tweets were enough to get it trending! Congrats to them – that isn’t a small feat.

While the whole thing still irked me, I was done obsessing over it and went back to watching the Grammy’s.

Then I got this string of replies from Chirpify’s Digital Marketing Manager:

While I agree that the mystery of the hashtag intrigued me (but really only because of B. Bonin Bough’s original tweet – otherwise I wouldn’t have even noticed the hashtag from the commercial), I still think this collaboration/activation/campaign/whatever you want to call it, missed their mark.

So, what do you think? Did I overreact to the lack of direction of this campaign or do you agree that one promoted tweet from Oreo could have made this whole experience a bit better? Did you even notice the commercial and hashtag at the very end? Did you happen to see the hashtag trending on Twitter? Were they trying too hard to recreate a Superbowl hit during the Grammy’s?

Let me know your thoughts below (even if you think I am putting way to much time and thought into this). I’d appreciate having a conversation about this social marketing campaign before the Superbowl and big hitters come out next week.