JC Penney's Drunk Super Bowl Tweet Stunt Was All About 'Narrative'

Last night, JC Penney confounded everyone who follows mid-priced retailers online with a series of tweets that seemed like they were coming from a rambling drunk person. But just like The Village, there’s a terrible, totally predictable plot twist that will make you roll your eyes and wish you gone for a nice walk outside instead of watching it go down.

Their night on Twitter started out like this, just as the game was getting underway:

So naturally, ~~everyone in the Twitterverse~~ all the people who follow JC Penney on Twitter hoping to score some sweet 20 percent off Jonathan Adler Designs deal was all OMG HACKED or OMG DRUNK SOCIAL MEDIA PERSON.

And of course, they kept it up for a little while!

Then, wouldn’t you know it, JC Penney pops in with perfect explanation of what these tweets were all about.

Surprise—they were trying to grab some attention from all the drunk people tweeting about how shitty the Broncos were doing last night. Apparently this was all pre-planned well ahead of time. By a person who was clearly drunk and/or hacking the company, right? No but seriously, this is what the company had to say about the whole thing:

J.C. Penney, rather than wait around for its own “Oreo moment,” decided it wanted to do something different during tonight’s game.

“We
knew Twitter would be very active but wanted to find a way to stay
above the Super Bowl fray and instead create our own narrative,” Kate
Coultas, a spokeswoman for J.C. Penney, told BuzzFeed in an e-mail.
“Given it was cold, and we are selling Go USA mittens — we thought it
could be a fun stunt!”

The explanation point is for extra fun! If you don’t know what they’re referring to, an “Oreo moment” is when a company brilliantly uses Twitter to cleverly capitalize on a big event in the public eye. Like last year during the Super Bowl’s crazy blackout when Oreo sent out a pretty funny tweet about dunking their cookies in the dark. Now, like children who just saw the neighbors get a new puppy, everyone wants their own “Oreo moment” on Twitter, too.

But whatever their motivations were, a lot of people got a good laugh out of it and lots of fun was had by all on Twitter last night. And JC Penney got
almost 20,000 retweets on each tweet. People like to retweet
when they think someone’s gone crazy or is drunk, I guess. Also, I am officially done writing “tweet” or “retweet” for the rest of the day.

Here, have the last word, blogger on Twitter:

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m off to go spend yet another half-week’s salary in the dress department at JC Penney’s, because no matter what the hell they’re doing on Twitter, they still have a ton of cute stuff I covet like a fiend.