On Sunday most of us witnessed the biggest day of the year for football and advertising. Things changed when the lights unexpectedly went out for around 35 minutes and some of the brands took advantage of the situation. Probably the biggest winner was Oreo who tweeted out the image at right.

Who else was a winner and how did they capitalize on the situation so quickly? The folks at CNET discussed the brilliant blackout tweets. Of course many others went to social media to make jokes about the situation.

My question to you is whether you will be ready to capitalize on an unexpected situation? Most likely it won’t be a Super Bowl ad, but businesses of all sizes can have an unexpected opportunity.

Let’s look specifically at the Oreo ad shown here. As described in the article, the designers and decision makers were all available so that things could move very quickly. While this graphic isn’t intricate, I’m sure all of the assets used were ready to use. Do you have all the assets you need? If you need artwork, I’m hope you’ll look at some of the artwork available at Graphics Unleashed.

Even if you have all the pieces, you have to know the software very well to knock something out in such a short time. Do you have that knowledge? If you have the stock shot of the cookie and the logo in the lower right, could you create this graphic in less than ten minutes? Less than five minutes? If you graphic skills are lacking, I sure hope you’ll consider getting a copy of CorelDRAW X6 Unleashed (or an earlier version).

The last piece of this puzzle was the network of Twitter followers built by the Oreo brand. Again, I know your brand is not as big as Oreo. But do you have a network ready when the unexpected happens? Are they on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or any mix of these networks? Some of you are probably shaking your heads about Twitter and I suggested you Use The Tao of Twitter to Full Grasp the Power of Tweeting. Remember that tweeting this ad cost Oreo next to nothing and their 30-second spot on the Super Bowl was more than $4 million! Not only did their followers receive this ad, so did the followers of the thousands of people who retweeted it. That includes my followers as I certainly passed it along.

My mom and I had many discussions throughout my life about the “fear of the unknown.” While we don’t know what opportunity may arise, we can certainly prepare ourselves as best possible to capitalize when it does happen.