In 2024 OREO has partnered up with a true icon: PAC-MAN. Being a brand with “playfulness” as core value: How can we turn the shopping experience itself into fun? For the first time ever, we turned the aisles of a supermarket into a live AR PAC-MAN maze. This AR experience bridged the gap between the tangible and the digital, offering a new realm of interaction for games in “phygital”spaces. By gamifying the shopping experience, we made sure, that everybody was chasing our product in an engaging playful way, taking the game of experience to purchase to a new level.

In the US, OREO has been connecting people with playfulness for over a century. In Europe, however, OREO is a young brand. In Germany, for example, the brand was only launched in 2011. The economic situation in Germany is increasingly deteriorating. As a result of the current inflation, purchasing power is decreasing. And thus, people are starting to pay very close attention to what they buy and, above all, how much money they spend on it. White label products and cheaper alternatives are more and more preferred.

Therefore, it is important for OREO to regularly find impactful ways to catch attention, enter people’s lives and establish its playful positioning – to be considered as right choice at the point of sale.

Regardless of how entertaining and successful the activation campaigns of OREO have been in the past years, they all had one blind spot: The shopping experience itself. Besides all economic hardships, shopping is simply and plainly boring. As a brand that has 'playfulness' as a core value, we thought this needs to change. And we asked ourselves: how can we transform the shopping experience itself into something playful?

With the launch of the European-led partnership with PAC-MAN early 2024, OREO wanted to bring excitement to the point of sale in Germany in a way that had never been done before.

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.

Being part of the 2024 OREO x PAC-MAN partnership campaign, the AR experience is not working against specific target numbers itself. We generally wanted to gamify the shopping experience. So we let consumers experience PAC-MAN from an ego-perspective and led them directly to the shelves with the OREO x PAC-MAN Special Edition product in an engaging and playful way. The AR experience is taking place from the 10th to 30th of April 2024. So at the time we are writing this entry sheet, still running. To date, 90% of the OREO x PAC-MAN Special edition in Germany already have been sold. Since the experience has not been finalized yet, we don’t have all information available at the time of submission. But to date in a single market every day between 50 and 300 people are playing PAC-MAN while shopping the groceries.

We turned the aisles of a supermarket into a live AR Pac-Man maze. And consumers into Pac-Man, chasing the OREO x PAC-MAN special edition. Playing ego-perspective Pac-Man in a supermarket while shopping and being chased by ghosts needed something different than the usual location-based VPS/ WebAR projects. We wanted a real walk-through-experience. So we needed to generate 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.

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.