Welcome, Guest [Sign In]

May 2008 - Strategy Magazine
Tribute

Oreo: Twist, lick and dunk

by Mary Dickie
page 59

There are a number of ways to consume an Oreo, and fans of the famous cookie, who gobble up approximately 500 million of them in Canada every year - apparently enough to form a stack 567 times higher than Mount Everest (although we haven't tried it) - are divided as to which is the ideal way to appreciate the two-toned treats. Some separate its chocolate wafers and peel off the vanilla icing with their teeth before tackling the cookie part. Others prefer to lick the filling off. And then there are the biters who avoid the deconstruction process altogether, and the speed eaters who pop the whole thing in their mouths.

The "ritual" of eating the Oreo has helped set it apart from other, single-layer, single-textured, monochromatic cookies. Over the decades, Oreo's marketers - now Toronto-based Kraft Canada - have capitalized on that with a number of slogans and spots that played on the theme, like "Twist to open," "Some disassembly required" and the recent "Diner" TV spot, which features a child and an older woman racing to the dunk stage.

"Our recent campaigns celebrate the Oreo ritual, but 'Diner' takes it to new heights with the lick race," says Kristi Murl, who has been Oreo brand manager for two months. "Oreo is the brand that lets people connect in simple ways, and over the years a lot of the marketing initiatives have supported that. It's the connection that people have with the brand - the moments it creates when people are twisting, licking and dunking."

Some of the Oreo campaigns, including "Diner," originate in the U.S., but others are dreamed up in Canada by AOR Draftfcb, which has worked on the brand since 1987. (Kraft Canada also works with a number of other agencies, including Starcom MediaVest, BzzAgent, Mackenzie Trade, Davis Design Partners, Edelman and Pierce Promotions.) Among the Canadian efforts are last year's "Flavours" series of half-page print ads featuring two Mint Creme Oreos sitting on a pillow, a Chocolate Creme Oreo posing as a chocolate cake and a straw sticking out of a Strawberry Milkshake Oreo. "The insight was that Oreo has a distinctive form," says Draftfcb CCO Robin Heisey, "so how could we interpret the different flavours in the language of Oreo?"

And for the launch of Golden Oreo in 2005, the agency created a print campaign with the tagline "Surprise Your Milk" and an accompanying TV spot featuring one child telling another, "When I was your age, Oreos were chocolate."

"I thought the 'When I Was Your Age' ad got the Golden Oreo news out there in a way that really made sense for the brand," says Draftfcb group account director Liz Ashworth. "At that point there had never been a different-coloured cookie base, and referring to the Oreo ritual with milk made it clear that we were doing something new."

Oreo existed in its classic creme sandwich cookie format until the '80s, when a number of product innovations were introduced, including Double Stuf, Chocolaty Covered and Baking Crumbs, for making cakes, pie crusts and other variations (see sidebar).

Quick Search