Super Bowl XLVII: Superdome power outage spawns viral Oreo, Tide ads during ‘Blackout Bowl’

CLEVELAND - When the lights went out at the Super Bowl, savvy advertisers seized the moment and gained a viral surge.

With the world watching and waiting through a 34-minute delay, a few companies quickly pushed out ads playing off of the blackout.

The fun ads didn’t cost the hefty Super Bowl commercial price tag, an average price of $3.8 million per 30 seconds, but reached a large number of social media users.

Oreo’s ad has been retweeted more than 14,000 times and Tide’s has notched more than 1,200 retweets.

Some have called it a “new era” of advertising, spontaneous and spur of the moment creations that fed the fast-paced social media machine.