Cookie sales experienced tremendous momentum during the well-known Pandemic Stock-ups that drove consumers to focus on availability and routine, at a cost to emotional benefit and brand differentiation. No wonder post-2020 was seeing declines of up to 18% in the cookie category. How could Mondelez help raise the entire category back up again as a brand leader, especially with a newly health-aware shopper? Our task was to customize a plan that would increase overall HHP for the cookie category while also growing trip incidence, with Gen Z+Millennial consumers as our core growth drivers.

Oreo STUF SCAN. A Mobile experience that turns every Oreo sneaker into an Oreo cookie coupon.

A fun and engaging activation that cements OREO’s position in culture, making us top-of-mind and creating mechanisms for immediate conversion and shop-ability within the experience itself.

What do sneaker culture, mobile shopping, and monochromatic trends have in common? OREOS! Black-and-white sneakers, known as the “OREO” colorway, are a huge collectible item within our younger target audience, and Target supermarkets was already one of their favorite retail destinations for trendy buys. We decided to hack the trend back from the sneaker world so OREO could own part of the cultural conversation and draw the spotlight back to the cookie category.

This is where we uncovered a true desire for “personality peacocking” fueled by unique, hard-to-find impulse buys and limited time offers. Raised on the Internet, these shoppers move at the speed of culture, need new “drops” to keep them engaged, and have no problem impulse buying with phone cameras. Keeping this in mind, we knew we needed to offer a mobile-powered commerce experience.

We hijacked all OREO sneakers for OREO cookies by transforming smart phone cameras into STUF SCANNERS. We collected, categorized, and labeled thousands of pictures of shoes in order to create a machine learning model that was able to recognize black-and-white shoes with a phone camera. Using TensorFlow, we created an on-device model that allowed users to participate in the program without their images (and potential PII) ever having to leave their devices--all through a micro site, with no app install needed.

All you had to do is access OREOSTUFSCAN.com on your phone, activate the camera, and scan literally any OREO colorway sneaker you could find. A successful scan yielded 2x1 rebate codes redeemable at any large format retailer.

A dynamic mix of influencers on Instagram and TikTok, OOH billboards, and retailer toolkits ensured we captured not only repeat consumers, but also new consumers through media and purchase adjacencies.

Our first measure of success, impact on the category, was fantastic by every measure. We were able to boost OREO cookie sales by 6.4% compared to the previous year overall, with .4% of that growth directed exclusively to our retail partners.

Our first measure of success, commerce impact on the category, was fantastic with an astounding 85% conversion rate. Overall we were able to boost OREO cookie sales by 6.4% compared to the previous year, with .4% of that growth directed exclusively to our retail partners, lapping the banner year OREO had in 2020 sales. Overall Cookie category sales increased +7.5% vs. PY and share grew by +0.2%.