Someone approved it. That’s the part no one talks about. Every single cringe brand post you’ve ever screenshotted, every “why would they DO that” moment you shared in a group chat, every reactive marketing disaster that made you physically recoil from your phone, someone in a meeting room looked at it and said: 

‍“Yes, this is a good idea, let’s send it.”‍

That person still has a job.

And they’re probably planning the next one right now. (Send help. Or therapy.)

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WTF Is Newsjacking? (And Why Everyone’s Doing It Wrong)

Let me give you the clean version first: 

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Newsjacking is when a brand spots a trending moment and figures out how to make itself part of the conversation. Done right, it feels organic. Almost lucky. Like the brand just happened to be standing in the right place when the spotlight swung over.

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David Meerman Scott literally wrote a book on it called Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage, and it's a good book. The way most marketing teams read it? Hot garbage.

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What they took away: react fast, post something, get seen.

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What they missed: the entire part about having something worth saying.

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Newsjacking is one of the most misunderstood tactics in PR because brands keep confusing speed with thinking, and those two things have never been the same. And yet here we are, watching brands panic-post their way into group chats they'll never live down.

The brands that actually nail newsjacking are specific. They have a point of view that clicks with the trend without needing three layers of "we can spin this" mental gymnastics. The ones that blow up in the bad way saw the trend, panicked, and started typing like their year-end bonus depended on it.

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Oreo's "Dunk in the Dark" Is the Most Misread Newsjacking Example in PR

Oreo's "dunk in the dark" tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout still gets paraded around as the gold standard. And yes, it was great. But here's what nobody mentions when they bring it up in your next strategy meeting: Oreo had a 13-person war room physically assembled at agency 360i's Manhattan office, with copywriters, strategists, graphic designers, and brand managers all in one place with pre-approved authority to post. 

Lisa Mann, VP of Cookies at Kraft, (a dream job for real) was the final approver and she was reachable in seconds. The team had even done a dry run the day before, running through "who writes the copy, who presses send" like a military drill.

That wasn't spontaneous genius. That was infrastructure that took 100 days to build.

For 100 consecutive days before the Super Bowl, Oreo had been running the "Daily Twist"  a war room experiment where the team commented on cultural moments in real time, building what Sarah Hofstetter, CEO of 360i, called "muscle memory." By the time the lights went out at the Superdome, this team had been practicing for exactly that kind of moment for months.

Most brands have got a Slack channel, a 22-year-old social manager, and three levels of approval while the trend quietly dies in real time.

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Why Most Newsjacking and Reactive Marketing Fail: The Slack Message That Starts Every PR Disaster

Here’s exactly how it goes. I’ve seen this script play out more times than I can count  almost word for word.

Someone drops a link in the marketing channel: “Guys have you seen this??”

Silence. Everyone is reading. Everyone is doing the quiet math on whether this is a moment or a career landmine.

Then  without fail, someone types: “Should we do something with this?”

And that sentence right there is where the disaster begins.

Because “should we” isn’t a strategy question. It’s a fear question. It means “I don’t want to be the one who said no if this blows up.” 

So nobody says no. The chat flips from “whether” to “how fast.” Half-baked ideas start flying. Someone drafts a post. It goes into review. 

Judgment leaves the building.

What they meant to say was: “we have no clue if this fits us, but FOMO is real, so we’re outsourcing the decision to the approval chain and praying.”

This is reactive marketing at its absolute worst. Not strategy. Group anxiety with a publish button.

The brands that actually crush trendjacking had the whole thing figured out before anyone dropped a link in the group chat. They knew their lane, they knew their limits, and their brand voice wasn't a forgotten Google Doc from the Obama administration. The trend just gave them a stage they were already dressed for.

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The Four Most Dangerous Words in PR: “We Can Spin This”

I need to linger here because “we can spin this” deserves its own flashing red siren.

When someone says “we can spin this,” what they actually mean is: this has zero natural connection to us, but if we squint and tilt our heads we can force a narrative that kinda works… if nobody looks too closely.

Bro. You know who looks closely? Your f*cking audience.

They can smell the desperation from a mile away. It’s that specific feeling not quite annoyance, not quite secondhand embarrassment  when a brand crashes a conversation it has no business being in. Like watching someone laugh at a joke they clearly didn’t get. Awkward. Uncomfortable. Cringe.

The Edelman Trust Barometer already proved what every chronically online person knows: Seventy-three percent of consumers say they trust a brand more when it authentically shows up. The ones who clock that you're faking it don't leave a review. They just stop. No tweet, no ratio, just a slow, quiet exit you won't notice until it's already happened.

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Newsjacking Examples: The Good, The Bad, and The “Who Approved This”

Good newsjacking examples have one thing in common: they feel earned.

You know it the second you see it. It doesn't feel like marketing. It feels like the brand was already in the room.

When M&S sued Aldi over Cuthbert the Caterpillar, Aldi didn't call a crisis comms meeting. They tweeted "This is not just any court case, this is... #FreeCuthbert" and watched the internet lose its mind. It hit because Aldi has been that brand, cheap, funny, unbothered, long before any lawsuit gave them the opening. The moment found them ready.

Ryanair is the same. They're cheap and they've never once pretended otherwise, so when something gives them an excuse to be chaotic online, nobody's surprised. That consistency is the whole thing.

Then there's the other kind.

A financial services brand posts a meme from a show they've clearly never watched, with slang that peaked eight months ago, and a caption that practically has "the intern suggested this" written all over it. The comments are half "why tho" and half people tagging friends like it's a crime scene. Nobody thinks about the product. Nobody.

That’s not a bad post, it’s so much worse than that…. That's a brand telling on itself!

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The 10-Second Test Nobody Actually Uses (But Should)

Before you hit post, ask yourself four questions out loud (typing them in a doc and ignoring the answers doesn’t count):

1. Does this sound like something we would genuinely say, or does it sound like we just discovered the trend and had a panic attack?
   
   
2. Are we actually adding anything new, or are we just the 31st account saying the exact same thing?
   
   
3. Is this trend still breathing, or are we showing up to a party where everyone’s already calling Ubers?
   
   
4. If our competitor posted this exact thing tomorrow, would we cringe?

If you feel ANY hesitation, close the tab. Save the draft in the “never open again” folder. Move on. Your brand will thank you in silence.

If any of those four make you pause, you already know the right call.

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Final thoughts about newsjacking

Newsjacking isn't the enemy. Panic is. 

Reactive marketing works when you already know who you are and the trend just gives you a reason to say it louder. If your team is rewriting your brand voice every time something blows up on a Tuesday, no amount of good timing will save you. 

Fix the foundation. The moments will still come.

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‍If this post challenged how you think about your PR strategy, the next step is auditing what your current approach is actually building  exposure or authority. The difference will determine how 2026 goes for your brand.

Work with us at Don’t Be A Little Pitch. We’ll tell you bluntly whether you should post that or close the tab and spare everyone.

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Frequently Asked Questions about newsjacking and trendjacking

What is newsjacking and why should I care? Newsjacking is when your brand crashes a trending news story or cultural moment for attention. When it works you look sharp and relevant. When it doesn’t your PR team quietly updates their LinkedIn and hopes no one screenshots it.

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How is trendjacking different from newsjacking? Newsjacking is strictly news events. Trendjacking is the wider chaos  memes, viral moments, pop culture beats, random social trends. Same chaotic energy, bigger playground, same risk of looking like a try-hard if you show up without a reason.

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What makes reactive marketing actually work? A clear brand identity that existed BEFORE the trend hit. Genuine relevance. Real timing (not “we finally got approvals after it peaked”). And someone on the team with actual authority to say yes or no without six rounds of Slack.

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How do I know if a trend is right for my brand? If you have to convince yourself it fits, it doesn’t. The right ones feel obvious something just clicks. The wrong ones require the phrase “we can spin this” and several mental backflips.

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Can you give me newsjacking examples of when it went wrong? DiGiorno live-tweeting #WhyIStayed without realizing it was domestic violence awareness. Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad turning civil rights protest imagery into a soda commercial. Brands posting #MeToo with zero context or meaning. All of them? Speed without understanding. Every single time.

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