Creamed it: Single cookie tweet beats multi-million dollar Super Bowl ads The image that made the ad industry crumble. Source: Twitter. ON A day when advertisers paid up to $US4 million for a 30 second slot, cookie company Oreo stole the Super Bowl ad battle with a single tweet. When the lights went out at the New Orleans Superdome, Oreo tweeted an image of a cookie in half light, half darkness, with a caption that read: "you can still dunk in the dark." The image was retweeted 15,000 times and counting, and the version on Facebook is drowning in "likes." But how did Oreo produce such a schmick pic so quickly? It was no accident. Before the game, Oreo assembled a sort of mission control at one of its ad agencies in New York. The room was staffed by members of the marketing team and senior cookie types. They gathered, poised and waiting for exactly the sort of unexpected situation that occurred in the third quarter when the Superdome lights went out for 34 minutes. In a flash, the team went to work. The Oreo graphic was designed, captioned and approved within minutes, according to Sarah Hofstetter, president of American ad agency 360i, who was speaking to US ad website adage.com. Oreo wasn't the only company to employ a little dark humour. The New Orleans Superdome is sponsored by Mercedes Benz, which prompted rival auto manufacturer Audi to tweet "Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now..." Mercedes Benz offered nothing in the face of Audi's taunting. Its twitter feed remained deathly silent. Laundry powder Tide also filled the void with a clever tweet: "we can't get your blackout but we can get your stains out." The events of yesterday have already sparked much discussion over the future of big, expensive ads. Super Bowl ads can cost millions of dollars to make and 30 second slots can sell for up to $US4 million. If a bunch of guys and girls with a smart idea and a smartphone can trump them for next to nothing, will the big guys like Doritos and Budweiser still bother? Analysts say they will. This year's Doritos ad with a crazed goat chomping its way through hundreds of packs of corn chips did really well. So did the Super Bowl ad which Oreo actually paid for. It featured a whisper fight in a library, with people arguing over whether they like the cookies part of the bikkie or the cream better. In a way, it's an analogy for the ad industry itself. Do you like big and flashy or quick and clever? The answer, for now at least, is that there's still a place for both.