Marketing at the Speed of Culture

In February 2013, during Super Bowl XLVII, the stadium lights at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans suddenly went out. The blackout lasted 34 minutes. Broadcasters vamped with images of players milling around while their producers scrambled. The millions of Americans watching at home started to do something that was becoming more and more common at the time: They scrolled through Twitter.

Oreo’s marketing team launched an immediate response. Minutes after the blackout began, it tweeted a simple picture of a single Oreo edging into the left side of the frame. The soft white spotlight on it faded to black on the right. The image was captioned “Power out? No problem” and included the tagline “You can still dunk in the dark.”

The post exploded. It was shared thousands of times, got more buzz than most of the Super Bowl commercials, and generated roughly 525 million earned media impressions. Oreo’s bold, fast post was praised for its marketing brilliance by media outlets around the world. This was the first time a brand had acted so quickly with so much humor and was so plugged into what was happening—in a way that resonated with so many. That one image of a cookie in the dark reshaped what brands believed was possible.

In the decade since that tweet, the ability to create and release marketing at the speed of culture, often referred to as fastvertising, real-time marketing, or newsjacking, has become a full-blown strategic capability. Oreo’s post wasn’t a random tweet from a social media manager. The brand had a dedicated Super Bowl “command center” with agency partners, creatives, and brand executives on hand to conceive and approve ideas instantly. When the blackout hit, that setup allowed it to create and post the tweet within minutes. Today companies are trying to replicate that agility with in-house creative teams, AI tools, and entire advertising ecosystems. The fastvertising model—producing rapid-fire, culturally relevant, platform-native content that engages people at just the right time—is no longer optional. Social media accelerates the pace of public discourse so much that being fast isn’t just a marketing edge; it’s a survival skill. In a world that prizes virality, there’s a zero-sum aspect to branding. If you don’t seize the moment, your competitors will—and they will be the brands that are seen as being in touch with the culture and customers. The conversation won’t involve you if you miss the opportunity.

When done well, fastvertising appears easy and inevitable. This may lull marketing teams into thinking that if they just act fast and say something, they will always be successful, but that’s not the case. It’s just as easy to get things wrong.

In this article we’ll use various examples to illustrate why fastvertising can be so effective, how to implement it, key principles for success, and how generative AI is providing new tools that increase speed and reduce costs. Our insights are derived from a range of sources. One of us (Ryan) has built a firm that specializes in fastvertising, and some of the anecdotes in this article describe that work. And three of us (Ayelet, Len, and Matt) created and teach a course at Harvard Business School called Moving Beyond Direct-to-Consumer, which examines how brands can adapt to today’s fast-paced culture, and have become fascinated with fastvertising while studying marketing trends.

Why Fastvertising Works

Fastvertising doesn’t just reward brands for being speedy; it rewards them disproportionately. As the Oreo tweet shows, when a campaign lands in the right cultural moment, it does more than resonate with audiences—it gets amplified by them. The value comes not from the media impressions a brand pays for but from the earned media that a campaign generates: reposts, press coverage, commentary, and word of mouth. A tweet written in a few minutes can end up on morning news shows, triggering days of headlines and millions of dollars’ worth of attention—achieving results that with paid ads would take a lot longer and cost much more.

With fastvertising the audience itself becomes the distribution channel. It helps brands tap into what people are already talking about and, in doing so, turn cultural participation into free publicity. In a world where attention is expensive, fastvertising can deliver it at a small fraction of the cost of more-traditional marketing—if you’re willing to strike while the iron is hot.

There’s a deeper reason fastvertising works: because it speaks to human connection. When a brand shows up in a cultural moment, it creates a feeling of shared experience. The brand isn’t just selling a product; it’s participating in a conversation with its audience. That creates a sense of presence and, with it, intimacy. It mirrors the dynamic that happens when a friend sends us a meme about a recent event just as we’re thinking about it, making us feel we’re in on a joke. The timing itself is a crucial part of the message—and if you miss the timing, the joke is no longer relevant.

Consider a Peloton campaign from 2019 that went viral for the wrong reasons and how another brand used fastvertising to respond to it. For the holiday season that year, Peloton created an ad called The Gift That Gives Back, which depicted a woman documenting her year of transformation after receiving a Peloton bike from her husband. The ad featured her recording selfie-style videos of her workouts, eventually stitching them together into a heartfelt thank-you to him. Instead of being seen as inspirational, the spot was widely criticized as tone-deaf and unsettling. Audiences read it as a story about a husband pressuring his already-thin wife to exercise more, and the woman’s anxious expression only reinforced that interpretation. Within hours of its release the commercial was being mocked across social media, late-night shows, and news outlets.

Just three days later, Aviation Gin released a new video online. (Disclosure: It was created by Maximum Effort, the marketing agency cofounded by Ryan, who also co-owned Aviation Gin at the time.) The gin ad turned the Peloton cultural firestorm into an opportunity. It featured the actress from the Peloton commercial, now seated at a bar with two supportive friends. Looking shaken but relieved, she raises a martini and mentions that her gin is smooth. One of her companions reassures her, “You’re safe here,” and they then make a toast: “To new beginnings.” The camera lingers as she downs her drink, implicitly positioning the Aviation Gin cocktail as her escape from the Peloton narrative. As the bottle is shown at the end of the ad, one of the friends is heard saying, “You look great, by the way.” Peloton wasn’t mentioned, and no backstory was explained; the ad simply let the audience connect the dots because everyone watching was already in on the joke.

The impact was swift. Within days, Aviation Gin’s video had amassed millions of views online, earning widespread coverage in media outlets. The ad never appeared in paid media, only on free social platforms, yet it delivered disproportionate returns in earned media, brand visibility, and goodwill. By transforming collective outrage into collective amusement, Aviation Gin demonstrated how fast, well-timed marketing can harness the power of shared experience, turning cultural participation into tangible brand equity.

A real-time response signals that a brand is alive, human, and paying attention to the cultural context surrounding its customers. When done well, fastvertisements do more than entertain; they create a subtle emotional bond. People begin to feel that the brand understands them—or at least understands what’s happening around them. In a world full of meticulously planned, static campaigns, that sense of spontaneity can feel surprisingly personal.

How to Succeed with Quick-Response Ads

Companies that want to produce effective fastvertisements need to keep five key principles in mind:

Speed is crucial. By the time a brand goes through the typical weeks-long (if not months-long) approval process to launch an ad, the opportunity will be gone. You have to react to events as they unfold, not after the fact. Culturally relevant responses to events, such as Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign, created in the wake of the quarterback’s kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial inequality and police brutality, aren’t uncommon in advertising. But Nike’s time horizon for the campaign, which launched more than a year after the controversy began, was in some ways too long. You need to be part of the conversation when it’s happening.

Several brands have capitalized on that logic. Arby’s—the restaurant franchise whose logo features a 10-gallon hat—famously tweeted, “Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?” during the 2014 Grammy Awards, when the artist’s own oversize (and remarkably similar-looking) hat became a meme. When an Uruguayan player bit his Italian opponent during the 2014 World Cup, Snickers reacted with a pitch-perfect post: “Hey @luis16suarez. Next time you’re hungry just grab a Snickers,” which included the tagline “More satisfying than Italian.” More recently, a viral cultural moment happened at a 2025 Coldplay concert: The kiss cam landed on a couple who appeared to be on a romantic outing—apparently a clandestine one, because they frantically hid their faces as soon as they realized they were being broadcast. That clip was suddenly everywhere, and internet sleuths quickly revealed that the duo were a CEO and his HR chief, who both were married to other people, leading to more online chatter and media coverage. StubHub, an online ticket reseller, jumped on the scandal, offering Coldplay tickets “for you and your favorite coworker”—a wink to the kiss-cam video for everyone who was in the know. The social posts all went viral and gained media attention not because they were polished—they weren’t—but because they were fast, sharp, and in sync with the news cycle.

To develop high-speed creative capabilities, brands have to adjust how they hire and develop employees. They need to find risk-takers who won’t go rogue, people who can move and think fast but not faster than the appropriate governance can handle. Brands that do well with fastvertising have teams that are deeply in tune with the culture and know which buttons to push, not unlike the writing teams for comedy shows and late-night talk shows. The key here is understanding the line between being faster and more aggressive and being too fast and reckless.

Speed also means establishing new processes for the quick-fire creation and publishing of content that maintains brand standards, passes legal clearances, and meets other requirements that typically slow down marketing. We see this in how the Oreo ad came together, looking smart and on-brand within minutes of a live event. That was possible because behind the scenes Nabisco and its ad agency had assembled the right response team in a command center.

Relevance beats production values. Many marketers still equate quality with impact and design their organizations to create the highest-quality content as efficiently as they can. But today the biggest driver of engagement is relevance: Cultural proximity is more valuable than production polish. IKEA proved that in 2017. After it was revealed that the cloaks worn by the Night’s Watch on the hit TV show Game of Thrones were made from IKEA rugs, the retailer posted on its online channels a branded do-it-yourself manual showing fans how to recreate the look using its Skold sheepskin rug. Styled exactly like an IKEA assembly guide, it was tongue-in-cheek (the required items were the rug and scissors, and the instructions were to cut a hole in the shape of a head in the rug and put it on), brand authentic, and highly shareable. Producing it called for fast creative thinking and design and a minimal budget. The results it got—hundreds of millions of impressions and a 775% spike in searches for the product—were disproportionate to its cost.

This principle applies across sectors. Frido, a pillow company, inserted itself into the Coldplay kiss-cam conversation with one line: “Bro could’ve just used our cuddle pillow and avoided all that embarrassment.” It was low-cost, timely, and on-brand, ensuring that it was retweeted and talked about by consumers and the media outlets that covered the aftermath of the video. The same can be said for a post by Specsavers, which responded to the 2017 Oscars moment when presenter Warren Beatty misread the card listing the Best Picture winner, momentarily giving it to La La Land instead of Moonlight. The eyewear chain quickly tweeted an image of a card in an envelope with its tagline “Should’ve gone to Specsavers.” None of these campaigns required months of ideation or high-end film crews. They worked because they were fast, funny, and contextually spot-on.

Another example of minimalism achieving outsize cultural impact came from the data company Astronomer, which employed the two executives caught in the Coldplay kiss cam. Before the video went viral, Astronomer was a tech company with a market value of more than $1 billion—but few people had heard of it. Days after the concert, Astronomer released an online video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow, the former spouse of Coldplay’s front man, Chris Martin. (This ad was also created by Ryan’s firm.) In the video, Paltrow is seated alone and introduces herself as a temporary spokesperson for the company, brought in because of the increased interest in Astronomer. She promises to answer people’s biggest and most common questions about the company. Of course, at that moment the most common questions were about the incident. But none of the questions Paltrow addresses go near it, and instead she delivers deadpan explanations of what the company does and its value proposition. Because the ad appeared during the heat of the scandal, the audience is in on the joke. It helped Astronomer change the conversation in a positive way and inform viewers, most of whom knew about the company only from the one viral moment. It allowed the company to take advantage of the crisis and turn it into an opportunity for brand building. The ad was produced inexpensively—it was essentially a single shot of Paltrow at a table—but because it was relevant, timely, and self-aware, it let the internet do the important work, generating millions of views.

Trust and organizational fluidity enable agility. One of the greatest obstacles to fastvertising is bureaucracy. Traditional marketing workflows are linear and slow: Agencies pitch campaign ideas, which get reviewed by client teams, vetted by lawyers, tested by research, approved by executives, scheduled by media, and launched months later. By then any cultural moment most likely has passed, and the work has become irrelevant. Take the Aviation Gin ad that drafted off the Peloton scandal. If the team had waited longer to test and vet it and the actress had not been available to shoot it within a couple of days, or if the media scheduling had caused delays, the ad would have come out weeks later. By that time no one would have recognized the actress from the Peloton commercial or remembered the outrage about it; the news cycle would have moved on. Out of context the ad would have fallen completely flat.

Fastvertising demands fluid structures. It thrives on compact, empowered, cross-functional teams that can ideate and act without wading through layers of red tape. At Maximum Effort, the teams are like SWAT units: small, integrated, and autonomous. If something happens in the culture at 9 AM, a team has the reflexes and processes needed to have a draft script by noon, a location booked by 2 PM, and the ad ready to go by dinner. That’s possible only because decisions are made quickly by people who understand both the brand and the audience and who trust one another to move fast and get it right. This model echoes Oreo’s Super Bowl command center, which ensured that the right set of people were in the same room at a particular event, ready to act instantly. However, a culture of fastvertising requires this kind of readiness all the time, not just for anticipated events, so teams can move the moment opportunity strikes.

For companies used to long planning cycles and multiple approvals, this approach can look reckless. Traditionally, CMOs act as guardians of risk, creating processes that minimize mistakes but also slow responses. But the real danger often is that you’ll miss the moment altogether. And if that happens, the cost isn’t theoretical. Competitors step in, dominate the conversation, and shape the narrative while your brand fades into the background. Silence is no longer neutral; it leads to lost share of voice and, over time, lost relevance. Fastvertising requires you to reframe risk: Is producing an ad in a day truly more hazardous than silence?

In practice, moving quickly doesn’t mean being careless; it means being prepared, responsive, and relevant. It’s about creating conditions where speed is possible: fewer handoffs, more empowerment, and shared accountability. Once leaders recognize that, the shift toward speed becomes easier to embrace.

Brands that succeed at fastvertising can move swiftly when events happen because they’ve set up systems with clear creative authority, faster legal reviews, nimble media buying, and teams that have the right to make culturally sensitive decisions without waiting for consensus. That kind of planning turns what feels like luck into a repeatable strategic advantage.

Humor, humility, and humanity fuel connection. When fastvertising is done poorly, it can come off as callous. There’s no shortage of examples where brands have fumbled by reacting quickly but without sensitivity. In 2011, Kenneth Cole tried to insert itself into the Arab Spring protests by tweeting, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online.” The backlash was immediate and intense. A year later, Gap posted about Hurricane Sandy: “All impacted by #Sandy, stay safe! We’ll be doing lots of Gap.com shopping today.” And in 2013, Epicurious responded to the Boston Marathon bombing with a well-meaning but oblivious tweet that paired “support for Boston” with a breakfast recipe. In each of these cases the public’s negative reaction was swift, and the brands ultimately deleted the posts and issued apologies. What had been intended as clever marketing had become a reputational liability.

These missteps have the same flaw in common: a problematic tone. The brands either underestimated the seriousness of the moment or overestimated their role in it. Such mishaps happen even when advertisers take the traditional route and spend weeks or months writing and producing a commercial. Take the infamous Pepsi ad that was released during a period of protests by various social justice organizations, including Black Lives Matter. It featured Kendall Jenner joining a protest and diffusing the tension by handing a police officer a Pepsi. It offended people by trivializing a serious issue, and Pepsi had to pull it and issue an apology. The problem in these cases wasn’t speed; it was poor judgment and a lack of awareness.

Speed doesn’t have to mean sloppiness. When you read the room and get the tone right in real time, fastvertising brings out the most human side of a brand: humility, humor, and a sense of shared experience.

This is especially true in moments of vulnerability. One of the best examples is KFC’s “FCK” ad in 2018. When the fast-food chain had a supply chain issue in the UK that left it with no chicken, it closed hundreds of stores and faced public frustration. Within a few days, instead of issuing a dry corporate apology, KFC took out full-page newspaper ads with an image of an empty bucket labeled with “FCK” (swapping the letters in the logo). The line below read: “A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It’s not ideal.” It was a simple and minimal design that led to millions of earned media impressions, a threefold increase in positive brand perception, and greater brand trust. It was funny. It was honest. And most important, it was human.

Fastvertising works best when it understands emotional tone. Sometimes that means silence. Sometimes that means self-deprecation. And sometimes it means using humor to connect during chaos. The ability to calibrate tone quickly is what separates great brands from reckless ones.

Failure is cheap—and necessary. Not every fastvertisement will go viral. In fact, most won’t. But that’s part of the point: The creative cost of trying has never been lower, and the upside has never been higher. It’s important to distinguish between a harmless miss and a damaging misstep, however. A miss is simply a post that doesn’t gain traction and is just part of the creative process. A misstep, by contrast, is when the tone is off and a brand invites backlash.

In traditional advertising millions of dollars might be spent on one big splash, but fastvertising thrives on volume and iteration. A tweet, a short video, a static meme—because these formats are cheap to produce, they’re also cheap to abandon if they don’t hit. But when they do hit, they can deliver free publicity, word of mouth, and goodwill that far outweigh the attention generated by any paid placement.

That’s why failure is baked into the model. Brands that succeed with it don’t expect every post to win. They expect to experiment, test boundaries, and occasionally miss. What matters is the overall batting average and the ability to react quickly to what the audience responds to.

There are plenty of examples of modest fastvertising misses—for example, brands that tried to ride the Coldplay kiss-cam scandal and came off as flat-footed or forced. A few pushed the tone too far. A high-end pen brand, Lamy Global, posted an image of the kiss-cam moment alongside fountain pens and the caption “He doesn’t know yet, but on Monday he’ll need a good pen to sign his divorce papers” before quickly deleting it. Others were simply forgettable. That’s fine. The brands that succeed recognize that not every idea needs to go through a focus group. They rely on instinct, agility, and the simple understanding that one well-timed cultural hit can generate more attention and brand love than dozens of carefully planned campaigns that never gain traction.

The Role of Gen AI

Gen AI turbocharges fastvertising’s already-rapid pace. With tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Runway, and ElevenLabs, teams can generate scripts, images, video drafts, and voice-overs in minutes. That lowers barriers to entry, both financially and operationally, allowing small teams to create content with levels of speed and effectiveness that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

This has a democratizing effect. Brands that previously lacked the resources to make or place professional video ads can now compete with bigger, more established, and better-heeled brands. At MNTN (the ad tech firm that acquired Maximum Effort’s marketing arm and where Ryan is now the chief creative officer), AI-powered tools for ad generation and performance optimization have enabled thousands of small and midsize businesses to get their first ads on connected television, something that used to be the domain of only big-budget national players.

Although AI can accelerate creative production, it doesn’t replace human judgment. Tools can give you a draft, but they can’t tell you whether the tone feels right. They can simulate humor, but they can’t sense the right timing. They can mash up aesthetics, but they don’t understand emotional subtext. This is where fastvertising still relies on the human element: people who understand storytelling, culture, and context.

Effective fastvertising requires an instinctive understanding of where the lines are: when humor crosses into cruelty, when commentary becomes insensitive, and when a moment isn’t the brand’s to own. These are the kinds of “human rules” that gen AI can’t reliably interpret. AI might understand structure—but not subtext. It can write a joke, but it can’t tell when a joke punches down. What makes fastvertising work isn’t just speed and wit; it’s an unwavering filter of humanity. Striking the right balance is a skill that still requires actual people. AI can produce content, but it can’t feel what’s fair, funny, or appropriate in the way an experienced creative team can.

The winning formula is a hybrid one: AI for speed and scale, people for heart and nuance. The best teams are using AI to ideate faster, iterate more prolifically, and remove roadblocks, but they’re not handing over the steering wheel entirely.

In the future we’ll most likely see AI-integrated fastvertising systems that react to live trends, autogenerate content drafts, and A/B test in real time. But the voice, humor, and emotional intelligence that make fastvertising work will remain uniquely human.

. . .

Fastvertising isn’t just a new way to make ads. It’s a shift in how brands relate to the world. It’s about showing up in the culture, not shouting at the public. It’s about being quick but not careless; funny but not cynical; and most of all, human. It requires teams that are empowered, structures that allow for speed, and a preference for relevance over rigidity.

Yes, it can be messy. Yes, it’s hard to systematize. And yes, it’s uncomfortable for people who are used to legacy processes built around control. But brands that have embraced it, from Oreo to IKEA to Aviation Gin to KFC, have shown that it’s worth it.

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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