Yesterday was the day that, each year, proves that people do not in fact hate advertising. They actually like it quite a bit if the advertising is good. What they hate is crappy and annoying advertising. Of course, every Super Bowl, various brands duke it out to see who can get the most bang for their buck in Super Bowl advertisements -- which this year went for a cool $3.5 million for a basic spot. Still, many people are pointing out that the real winner of the Super Bowl advertising fight wasn't from one of the TV commercials at all, but rather Oreo's advertising agency, who sprung into immediate action when the power went out at the Super Bowl. Within just a few minutes (I think slightly less than 15), Oreo had put out the following tweet:

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Just in case you can't see the embed, it says "Power out? No problem." And then had the following image with the caption "You can still dunk in the dark." A few other brands got out some clever tweets, such as Walgreens tweeting that it carries candles or Audi tweeting that it was sending some LEDs over to the Super Bowl. Twitter claims that four minutes after the lights went out an advertiser had already bid on "power outage" as a search term (you'd think "black out" might have been more effective). But Oreo actually got that graphic together, with the caption, and got it all up online quite quickly. I'm in awe, given that with big brands you normally expect there to be a bit too much red tape and "approvals" for anything like that. For Oreo, the key to having this work was that its ad agency folks and all of the key people from Oreo were in a room together, so the approvals went fast.

Tide also got a "blackout" graphic and joke online, three minutes after Oreo. It put up a weak image with a caption: "We can't get your blackout, But we can get your stains out." Kudos for trying, but definitely a step behind Oreo.

It's worth noting, by the way, that Oreo did, in fact, pay for a Super Bowl commercial as well, though it was showing up on lists of the worst Super Bowl commercials of the year. Whoever came up with the image and the tweet in record time may have saved the Super Bowl for Oreo.

Of course, all of this does raise a larger point about marketing and advertising these days. Doing a good job often has less to do with how much money you spend than with how good you are at actually connecting with people -- and a well-timed tweet and graphic can do wonders.