DiGiorno and “The Sound of Music”: Spontaneous Tweeting Pays Off

NBC's The Sound of Music Live
The Sound of Music Live [image: NBC]
When does realtime marketing have the greatest impact?  For DiGiorno pizza, being spontaneous – and knowing where their audience is at a given moment – recently created a huge spike in engagement on Twitter.

One week ago, NBC aired a much-promoted live broadcast of “The Sound of Music,” starring Carrie Underwood. What does this have to do with pizza, you may ask? As it turns out, more than you might think.  An “absolutely spontaneous” series of tweets from DiGiorno during the live broadcast ended up gaining attention from several major media outlets, reports AdAge.

DiGiorno knew the live broadcast of the musical would be generating a fair amount of buzz on social media, and the brand “wanted to get in on the conversation.”  Brian Linz, DiGiorno’s Brand Manager, told Ad Age that the tweets were not planned in advance — but DiGiorno’s agency, Resource, did have someone on hand to tweet during the live event.

Once the first tweet took off (with 550 retweets), “the momentum continued to roll where we just couldn’t stop.” Using #TheSoundofMusicLive, the brand’s tone was fun and humorous with “just enough snark” and produced some serious results:

  • @DiGiornoPizza added 4,000 followers from Thursday night to Friday afternoon
  • there were 14,000 tweets from 8,000 different contributors mentioning DiGiorno and related to “The Sound of Music”

Like Oreo’s brilliant tweet during the SuperBowl blackout, DiGiorno was in the right place at the right time on social media, with exactly the right tone.  As a result, the brand scored some great (and completely free) brand exposure and signficantly expanded its reach on social media.