Looking at the entertainment market, in 2023 the gaming industry has reached twice the size of Hollywood. A strong growth factor: The casual and retro gaming sector, producing hundreds of millions of downloads. That's a call for the world's No. 1 playful cookie: OREO. To accelerate growth and penetration across European markets, OREO brought even more playfulness to Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. This time, we played together with retro game icon PAC-MAN. Following up with the European-led partnership OREO wanted to amplify the campaign in Germany in a way that could involve retailers and excite consumers at the point of sale. The objectives: create an exciting point of sale experience that not only is appealing for consumers, but also allows OREO to obtain more visibility at the point of sale.

2024. The year OREO and Pac-Man decided to shake things up. The year, we turned OREO cookies into Pac-Man mazes. But we wondered: how can we turn even shopping the OREO x Pac-Man special edition into a playful experience? So we turned supermarkets into live AR Pac-Man mazes. And consumers into Pac-Man, chasing the OREO x PAC-MAN special edition. And of course, being themselves chased by the original four ghosts. After scanning a QR-Code with their phones, a path of AR-OREO cookies appeared directly in front of the consumers. Following the virtual cookie path and munching the delicious OREOs lead them directly to the OREO x PAC-MAN special edition shelf. By gamifying the shopping experience, we made sure, that everybody was chasing our product in an engaging and playful way.

40% of people are into gaming. Playful as we are, we felt that's not enough. And decided to turn absolutely everyone into a gamer. So, we reviewed data on consumer behavior and trends. Since lockdown, retro-gaming made a comeback and was appealing to younger consumers too. It combines nostalgia and pure playful game value: perfect match for OREO.

Core target: Gen X (families with head of households). Secondary targets: Millennials but also Gen Z. The campaign had to be cross-generational. And guess who is the most iconic character of retro-gaming? PAC-MAN. PAC-MAN was created to achieve broad appeal (across gender / age), with bright colors and a simple interface. Beyond data, PAC-MAN has the shape of an OREO cookie, and the original OREO cookie embossment looks like a maze – match made in heaven. Our simple call to action: SCAN PLAY WIN to engage with all consumers.

We wanted a real walk-through-experience. So we generated a huge point cloud to recreate a digital twin of the supermarket. And with a bit of machine-learning-wizardry and some fancy computer vision algorithms, we were able to achieve a live centimeter-level positioning of all our retro-gamers in the supermarket.

So the fun could begin: After scanning a QR-Code with their phones, a path of AR-OREO cookies appeared directly in front of the consumers.

Following the virtual cookie path and munching the delicious OREOs lead them directly to the OREO x PAC-MAN special edition shelf. But only if they were clever enough to escape the ghosts. And only the best shopping gamers or gaming shoppers made it to the top of the store leader board to win big.

The OREO x PAC-MAN #ChasePlayfulness campaign is still active when submitting this entry so we cannot determine yet the individual performance of the AR in-store maze. So far, the overall campaign has reached 535.7 Million impressions, sparked 2.253 Social Media conversations and a total of 200.979 games have been won European-wide. To date, 90% of the OREO x PAC-MAN Special edition in Germany already have been sold.

The AR experience drove a lot of positive reaction and attention in-store and online. In only 2.5 hours, 53 people played and entered the brand database. It demonstrates the ability of tech to gamify the retail space, people’s responsivity while fleshing-out our positioning. Seeing the engagement and the quality of the experience, the retailer asked us to extend the experience for a month when we initially negotiated one day.