Arby’s Slayed the Grammys With This Tweet About Pharrell Williams’ Hat

The sandwich chain's post about Daft Punk collaborator Pharrell Williams' sartorial selection ("Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?") was a responsive-marketing coup de grâce, with 75,000 retweets and more than 40,000 favorites by Monday morning.

Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs— Arby's (@Arbys) January 27, 2014

To be sure, jokes about Pharrell's hat, which looked borrowed from Smokey Bear, had been flying around Twitter for more than an hour before Arby's made its post. But man, what a post.

Many marketers attempted to tie their brand messaging in with the Grammys, but as you can see in Digiday's roundup, few succeeded. Arby's even merited praise from global brands like Pepsi and Hyundai, which is an odd new level of meta marketing.

#Win RT @Arbys Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs— Pepsi™ (@pepsi) January 27, 2014

Well played, @Arbys. Well played. #GRAMMYs #HyundaiTweetAwards pic.twitter.com/xGBT3lmPbm— Hyundai USA (@Hyundai) January 27, 2014

But when it comes to responsive marketing to celebrity antics, the best a brand can hope for is a response from A-lister him- or herself. And that's exactly what Arby's got in the early hours of this morning, when Pharrell asked on Twitter, "Y'all tryna start a roast beef?"

Y'all tryna start a roast beef? "@Arbys: Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs”— Pharrell Williams (@Pharrell) January 27, 2014