By Kathryn Wolper

Last week, a dress demonstrated the power of a single photo to “break the Internet”. The blue/black or white/gold controversy went viral, setting a new standard for how quickly and strongly one image can inundate social media platforms. Ever aware of social media trends, countless companies rode the controversy’s coattails and made themselves visible in the ongoing debate.

Adweek compiled a comprehensive list of tweets by companies seeking to capitalize on the dress debate. Each of these directs some premise of the controversy toward its own brand, either by color association or targeted marketing. Many of these tweets read the same: “#TheDress is obviously (insert brand colors here).” Downy and Tide were responsible for the most topically appropriate tweets, and they published tweets that drew the connection between clothing colors and laundry products.

This example of advertising opportunism shows that companies are paying attention to their social media presences and working quickly to join the conversations before they fade. Social media platforms give companies the advantage of supplementing large-scale, paid advertising campaigns with nearly free advertising on social media. Users are highly selective about the pieces of media to which they choose to pay attention, so companies with strong presences and positive track records for interactions with consumers reap the rewards of their efforts.

However, there is one caveat to the business of meme opportunism in advertising. Companies should only exploit the advertising opportunity if their product has some connection to the meme at hand. In the case of the dress controversy, Tide and Downy are in the clear, because they sell products that deal with clothing. But for Charmin and IHOP, relating dresses to toilet paper and pancakes proved too much of a stretch. A very fine line exists between clever associations and nonsensical attempts at humor for the sake of advertising.

Companies must prove to consumers that they are worthy of social media attention, and that they understand that attention is a privilege. Luckily, platforms like Twitter allow companies to track the visibility, reception and consumer interaction with the advertisements they produce. The number of retweets a tweet earns can help a company improve its advertisements and tailor them to the audiences who are most likely to interact with them. Companies could easily issue boring tweets and posts that would be ignored, but instead, their social media experts found a niche market and flourished.

The dress debate can teach companies using social media to advertise an important lesson: Just because one can participate in a conversation does not mean one should. However, with enough creativity and awareness of one’s audience, meme opportunism in advertising can be successful, clever and well received.