Moon Pie savagely owns Hostess with solar eclipse tweet

Monday brings us the first total solar eclipse in the U.S. since 1979, the first eclipse in the era of social media. Predictably, #brands were ready to capitalize on the event with some timely #marketing.

This is a boring part of the background noise of capitalism, and nobody really cares. Until the brands start fighting among themselves on Twitter. You may not be in the “totality zone” for the eclipse, but you’ve got a front-row seat for Hostess snack cakes getting owned by Moon Pie.

This morning, Hostess declared its Golden CupCakes food product “the official snack cake of the eclipse.”  The company probably thought this was noncontroversial, because it’s a dominant #brand in the snack “space,” and because the title “official snack cake of the eclipse” is meaningless.

But it’s not a damn cupcake that’s blotting out the sun today, and Moon Pie wasn’t about to let Hostess forget it. Whoever runs Moon Pie’s social media accounts is having a very good day.

Hostess clearly did not see that coming. They never considered Moon Pie a legitimate threat. And, faced with a very good own from a smaller brand, they had to think quickly to defend their arbitrary position as “the official snack cake of the eclipse.”

And they came up with “Uhhh, well, uh … a pie is not a cake?”

No one’s buying it. Moon Pie is not literally pie, and Moon Pie’s tweet has been liked 100,000 times. That’s more “likes” than Hostess has followers.

https://twitter.com/UnholyMoses/status/899635385604689924

Even the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is associating Moon Pie with Monday’s astronomical event.

Sometimes, you just have to admit you’ve been eclipsed.