Newsjacking

Get coverage and reach when you're not the news

Author

Nate Smoyer
November 22, 2023

The Oreo Black Out ad, might be one of the most famous examples of newsjacking.

Before we get too far, newsjacking is the delicate art and science of leveraging current events to gain exposure for your brand.

Let’s look at an example:

During the Super Bowl in 2013 there was a temporary blackout in the stadium. Almost immediately, Oreo ran this post on X:

Simply brilliant.

The timing was fast. Oreo was first to jump on this. They acknowledged what was happening, and then bridged back to them. Totally masterful. The tweet went viral and became talk of the town amongst advertisers for days.

“But Nate, ain’t nobody paying attention to our brand during the Super Bowl.”

That may be true. And I’m sorry. But what if you don’t need the Super Bowl? 🤔

OpenAI Drama and Real-Time Newsjacking

How to best execute a newsjacking is tough to determine. Inherently, newsjacking is risky (for many reasons, see post conclusion for more). But one proptech found a way to win last week with the drama surrounding OpenAI.

The drama kicked off Friday, November 17 when the news of Sam Altman being fired as CEO of OpenAI reached Twitter. You can see the search trends here for both OpenAI and Sam Altman. Even if you knew nothing about the hype on Twitter, you can see below this became a very hot topic—quickly!

Popular X personality, angel investor, and product leader, Alex Cohen, published a parody post on X about OpenAI and having been laid off (he’s done quite a few of these types of posts in the past).

But it was the next post 15 minutes later that was the win for one proptech.

Roofer.com didn’t actually hire Alex—it was a play off the initial parody post. But Roofer.com did score over 1.3M brand impressions from this tweet, as per X’s post stats. In addition, the tweet saw 4,300 Likes, 216 Bookmarks, 345 Re-Posts, and 162 Comments.

This was super clever and incredibly timed. If you were to pay for this sort of reach, a moderate estimate using X’s ad platform at a $10/CPM would cost you $13,000—just for the reach, not including engagement!

But what if you don’t have relationships with popular X personalities or keep up with tech drama?

Stick with What You Know

One thing I know is many companies care A LOT about awards programs. Awards programs tend to take a little bit of time in applying and some money. Some programs cost a lot of money. Naturally, companies want to make it feel worthwhile winning awards by ensuring their award is seen as much as possible. That means brands often share and re-share coverage of their award. Some awards programs are so popular, that media outlets report on the results of another media outlet’s awards program—such as the Inc 5000.

The Inc 5000 is one of the most well-known awards/ranking programs. It attempts to rank the 5,000 fastest growing private companies in the US.

I’ve helped three companies in the last six years achieve Inc 5000 recognition, including the last two startups I lead marketing at. It costs quite a bit of money for the companies to license the Inc 5000 logos to brag about this recognition. So there’s motivation to share and re-share any coverage of winning a spot on the list.

I’ve used the Inc 5000 program for coverage a few ways over the years. The first is when I know my company is going to be on the list, I tease reporters ahead of time. Here’s an example of how I’d do this via DMs on X:

I was actually wrong on this tip, we had to wait another week yet. Still, the reporter had a heads up and at least a clue as to one company on the list.

Then the morning the list goes live, I follow up as quickly as possible:

The above effort led to getting Obie featured in a wrap-up article of proptech companies, featured an industry specific media outlet. And I did this exact thing two years prior for Avail.

But even if you’re not working with reporters, you can create your own newsjacking. I did this earlier this year, leveraging the Inc 5000 list, by creating a special podcast episode and post on the Tech Nest website—which was shared by many of the companies on the list and led to more downloads than standard episodes.

Snaplistings re-shared my post, recapping Inc 5000.

Stick to what you know (your industry, relevant people, popular traditions or programs), and you can ride the wave of the news.

Three Need-to-Knows on Newsjacking

Before I send you back out into the wild for you to attempt your own form of newsjacking, I want to leave you with some info to help guide your path.

  1. Timing matters as much, if not more, than the content. You need to be fast! Days later, people have moved on and you’ll fall flat.

  2. Don’t depend on this tactic to regularly win exposure or coverage. It’s kind of like a fake punt in football. When the situations calls for it, then execute. But try it too frequently, and it’ll never work.

  3. Newsjacking is risky. If your content misses, offends, or attracts the wrong audience, you could damage your brand’s reputation. Proceed at your own risk.

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