When a brand partners with another brand, it can often end up in the juxtaposition of two logos on a pack. We wanted to achieve more than just borrowed notoriety, increased visibility or reach of consumers of the partner brand. But how do we really leverage each brand’s universe and what’s in it for consumers? Partnering with Xbox, we turned brand collaboration into a playful consumer experience and set the scene for OREO’s collaborations to come.

Gaming is now the largest sector in the entertainment business, with a worth of $176bn in 2021 – making this industry bigger than Hollywood. A recent report, published by DFC Intelligence, has revealed that nearly 3.1 billion people worldwide play video games, which is about 40% of the world’s population. Gaming as a hobby and interest has never been more popular and in OREO’s race to be the treat of choice among European millennials, showing up for this passion point is a fast way to drive trial and accelerate growth potential among our target. To bring more playfulness into the world and make gaming more fun for everyone, the world’s number one cookie, OREO, and international gaming giant, Xbox, partnered to create an unmissable activation and unlock playfulness in real life.

OREO has been connecting people through playfulness for more than a century in the US but is still a young brand in Europe. Spain was the first European market to launch OREO, and it was as late as 1996. Other markets have waited the 2010’s to enjoy the black and white cookie. Therefore, brand maturity varies a lot across markets which all have different biscuits culture and their own local heritage brands to compete with.

Whilst brand awareness and differentiation are consistently strong, OREO is often perceived as a foreign brand, an American cookie disconnected to European consumers. It is then critical for OREO to regularly find impactful ways to catch attention, enter people’s lives and establish its playful positioning.

Partnerships tapping into various passion points (music with Lady Gaga, movies with Batman) have been used in the past but were adapted from the US. “OREO Cheat Cookies” was the first European-led activation to specifically address and recruit European consumers building cultural relevance and fame locally. Finding an activation able to suit markets despite their diversity was yet challenging.

An underlying aim of the partnership was also to reinforce the customers in-store support and the business in a period usually quiet: sales slowdown and shelves animation decreases in the first quarter of the year after the Xmas boom.

Being OREO, we couldn’t enter video gaming without being playful with its vernacular. Gamers are very familiar with cheat codes that give access to bonus features (skins, weapons, lives…). Finding and using them increase the play value of any game. But the gaming vernacular actually resonates with everyone: who is not looking for playful hacks to upgrade any experience in real life?

Therefore, we looked for an innovative solution to turn our real-life cookies into cheat codes. Doing so, we leveraged the universes of the two partners while mutually enriching the experience offered to consumers.

OREO cookies are playful by nature: you twist, lick or dunk them. But what if our cookies could bring playfulness in Xbox games as famous as Halo, Sea of Pirates and Forza for a limited period of time? What if OREOs were allowing you to unlock exclusive hidden features? Building on this gaming insight according to which there are always hidden feature to reveal with a cheat codes, we changed our cookies to look like buttons of a joypad creating unique cheat codes.

Tapping into gaming culture and the popularity of cheat codes, we made our cookies relevant and exciting for the gaming community and offered an innovative and unique playful hunt to all consumers.

Everyone loves to unlock hidden features, whether in games or even in real life. And the easiest way to do it is by using Cheat Codes. A sequence of combinations that allow players to unlock special items in the game that are not available through standard play. Cheat codes have become so common in everyday life. People are trying to find cheat codes for activities entirely unrelated to gaming. In 2023, OREO and Xbox brought the nostalgia around cheat codes back, inviting consumers to create combinations with cookies. For the first time in Europe, OREO has launched 6 different embossments, inspired by the Xbox controller buttons, giving the cookies an innovative role and creating a gaming experience. From the iconic Xbox logo to the signature A, B, X, Y and arrow buttons, consumers were able to create combinations with the OREO Xbox Special Edition and unlock prizes on our website.

With 6.7 billion impressions and 5.8 average engagement rate, OREO Cheat Cookies took consumers and the gaming community by storm: it became a trending topic on Reddit and X, the campaign website even counted people from the US and LATAM, social media was filled with frustrated non-Europeans who couldn’t get the product. The stock of the limited edition was sold out in less than 3 months. OREO grew by +8.4% within the total biscuit category (Nielsen, value change H1 2023, Europe). More than 827 419 items have been unlocked. But the ultimate proof of success of the campaign were the repeated attempts to crack the redeem serial numbers that forced us to change codes every 20 minutes. But who are we to blame the cheaters?

OREO Cheat Cookies paved the way to our next collaborations and has defined our long-lasting strategy turning the product experience into a playful consumer experience.