Speed, agility, and dexterity define great athletic ability. They also appear equally important for advertising ability. When brands can react promptly and flexibly to constantly changing consumption trends and culturally relevant opportunities, they can achieve remarkable success and outperform their competitors, just as athletes attempt to do each time they play.
The need for such marketing dexterity has always existed, but as a result of modern technological developments, brands have remarkable new opportunities to display such nimbleness. In noting this development, a group of advertising experts has proposed the notion of fastvertising, a marketing strategy that involves the rapid development and distribution of clever responses to cultural events in real-time. By releasing a creative reaction to a pertinent event almost immediately, brands can garner additional impressions, earned by exploiting the chatter that surrounds the event itself but also by demonstrating their own cleverness and ability to join in on the fun.
An early example of fastvertising gave Oreo cookies a remarkable brand boost. The Super Bowl is consistently one of the most watched sporting events in the world, and advertisers spend millions to have their brands featured for mere seconds during the broadcast. But during Super Bowl XLVII, just after Beyoncé had finished her thrilling halftime show, the New Orleans Superdome went dark, having suffered a massive power outage. For 34 minutes, players wandered the field, spectators sat in the dark, viewers at home wondered what was happening—and Oreo’s social media team took to Twitter to promise that the sandwich cookies could be enjoyed regardless, with the line, “Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.” For the millions of curious viewers, who likely had turned to their mobile devices searching for an explanation for the outage, the rapid, humorous response represented a novel appeal. The tweet reached more than half a billion people within minutes.
Even if responsiveness and dexterity have long been advertising goals, and even if this example of fastvertising is more than a decade old, brands still struggle to achieve such success. Corporations are notoriously slow to approve new ideas, as well as particularly loath to spark any sort of controversy. To embrace fastvertising, they cannot simply update their advertising strategy; they must challenge the logic that underlies typical marketing recommendations to design and release advertising content only when it appears guaranteed to improve, or at least not undermine, the brand’s current position. In this view, doing nothing is better than doing something wrong. But a fastvertising approach takes the view that any reaction is better than none, as long as it is driven by a particular sort of intelligence that combines emotional appeals and humor with a clear understanding of current cultural moments.
Notably, among the authors of the team credited with coining the term, we find an unexpected name. Rather than another scholar, the team includes the actor-turned-entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds (aka Deadpool), who is widely known for his quick wit and edgy, borderline inappropriate humor. When promoting brands in which he has investment stakes, Reynolds consistently deploys those characteristics, and because he has substantial ownership shares, he can undertake such deployments rapidly, without having to wait for permission, approval, or sign-offs from large corporate structures.
For example, when Peloton released a holiday commercial in which a man gifted his female partner an exercise bike—and viewers responded in horror, calling out the brand for sexist views and identifying the protagonist as a hostage to a red-flag relationship—Reynolds seized on the moment. He hired the female actor who received the terrible gift in the Peloton advertisement to maintain her characterization and play the same role in an advertisement for his gin brand. Seen sitting in apparent shock, surrounded by friends animatedly trying to talk her out of the relationship and “exercise cult,” the actor took a sip from a drink. Peloton was never mentioned by name, but the reference was clear, and the cheeky voiceover at the end, voiced by Reynolds himself, promised that an “exercise bike is not included.”
But as we noted, flexibility and responsiveness remain key, and Peloton clearly learned that lesson when dealing with the blowback to its advertisement. Therefore, when it confronted another public relations disaster, due to an unfortunate product placement event, it was better prepared to exhibit its own fastvertising. Peloton had agreed that its products could feature in the Sex and the City spinoff show, And Just Like That…. But unbeknownst to the brand, the product would be featured as implicitly responsible for the death of Mr. Big, a popular character whose heart attack appeared brought on by his workout on a Peloton bike. Rather than accept such a problematic narrative link, Peloton took a page from Reynolds’s playbook and hired the actor who played Mr. Big to appear in brand advertising, in a loose continuation of his star role. As the character reemerges, a rapid voiceover by (of course!) Ryan Reynolds outlines the health benefits of cycling and insists that Mr. Big actually is alive and thriving, because he remained dedicated to his heart-healthy workouts.
Again, the quick-witted response was lauded, as was the timeliness of the punchline. In this particular iteration of fastvertising, the campaign acknowledged the importance of the character to the series, and the shock expressed by fans of the show when he died; the serious harm that the original feature could cause the Peloton brand, by creating an implicit connection between product usage and mortal danger; and also the slightly ridiculous quality of the whole situation, in which no one actually died.
As these collected examples show though, sometimes effective advertising, or fastvertising, can contribute to the life or death of a brand. Like players who have reached the Super Bowl or regular people trying to complete a difficult Peloton routine, being fast and nimble can be the winning formula for brands.
Discussion Questions
- Can you think of other examples of fastvertising that you’ve seen? What made them successful, or not?
- Why would Peloton choose to work with Reynolds, after he had run a campaign that mocked its marketing in the past?
Sources: Ayelet Israeli, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Matt Higgins, and Ryan Reynolds, “Marketing at the Speed of Culture,” Harvard Business Review, January 2026; Li Cohen, “Star of Viral Peloton Commercial Appears in New Ad—This Time for Gin,” CBS News, December 17, 2019; Nick Turner, “Peloton Fires Back with Chris Noth Ad After ‘Sex and the City’ Damage—Spoiler, He’s Alive,” Financial Post, December 13, 2021.
