• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, June 20, 2013

The MediaPost Brand Marketers Summit is underway with a keynote address from Adriana Llames Kogelis, a Sears Holdings vice president in mobile and social media marketing. Kogelis touched on real-time marketing and said Oreo's Dark Dunk effort during the Super Bowl was extremely successful, partly because the company was prepared and invested heavily in it, so she noted the tactic is not cheap and requires a lot of prep work. Real-time marketing cannot be set up in real time to break out.

At her company, she highlighted Kmart's "Ship My Pants" campaign (say it fast and you'll get it). It was a risk since Kmart is a family-oriented brand and the campaign was not in line with that orientation.

So, the company gambled "realizing we were taking the brand to a whole new level and putting the brand at stake."

Data showed it worked. It wasn't planned to be a national TV effort, but online reaction prompted it. Results showed it had more than 20 million online views and more media value than a Super Bowl spot in the end.

Kmart made the decision to heavy-up on the effort by monitoring social media reaction to "Ship My Pants" over an inital 24-hour period.

It went "crazy viral" and got a "Today" pick-up on NBC, which is big-time earned media.

The campaign was targeted at non-traditional Kmart customers with appearances on late-night shows. After success was shown, media the company used more commonly was employed.

This post initially appeared as a Raw post on June 20.