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Look Out Oreo, Arby’s Left You In The Dust With A Tweet About Pharrell’s Grammys Hat

Danny Sullivan on January 27, 2014 at 4:54 pm

Move over, Oreo. You earned kudos last year for your quick-thinking funny tweet when the 2013 Super Bowl blackout happened. But there’s a new kid in town, Arby’s, showing that roast beef can newsjack a live event as well as the sweet stuff.

Last night, in response to unusual hat worn by singer Pharrell Williams at the Grammy Awards, Arby’s spotted a resemblance to its own hat and joked about getting it back:

Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs

— Arby’s (@Arbys) January 27, 2014

The tweet currently has about 80,000 retweets, which is over five times more than Oreo’s “You Can Still Dunk In The Dark” tweet earned last year. It’s currently at around 16,000 retweets:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Arby’s also scored because Pharrell himself found the tweet funny enough to reply back to Arby’s. “Y’all tryna start a roast beef?,” he joked, a tweet that itself currently has nearly 11,000 retweets:

Twitter___Pharrell__Y_all_tryna_start_a_roast_beef_____

Arby’s tweet is well-short of the 400,000 retweets that happened to tweets about the tragic deaths of Cory Monteith and Paul Walker last year. But in terms of a brand “newsjacking” tweet, it’s probably the biggest we know of, though we’re checking to confirm. Twitter, in its Grammy’s round-up, did confirm it was the most retweeted tweet of the night.

Another brand that scored well during the Grammy’s, from a nice round-up by Digiday, was Gain laundry detergent, with just over 8,000 retweets currently for a similar play off Pharrell’s hat:

.@pharrellhat how embarrasing we’re wearing the same thing. #twinsies #mountie #MusicToYourNose pic.twitter.com/x2id16ndNR

— Gain Laundry (@Gain) January 27, 2014

FYI, Oreo itself was busy during the Grammys, with a #sendmeoreo campaign to send the first 20,000 people to tweet a free pack of their new Cookie Dough or Marshmallow Cookie Oreos.

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.