Every year, OREO crafts a remarkable fan-first partnership to drive sales and the internet wild. With their 25th anniversary approaching, we chose Pokémon.

This campaign’s objective was to stand out in a crowded category that’s awash in partnerships, to go beyond slapping a logo on a cookie. We needed to translate Pokémon’s core rarity scheme to real-life OREO packages and transform the classic Limited Time Offer brand partnership into a sought-after cultural hit.

Objectives:

Drive brick-and-mortar and online sales of this LTE pack: KPIs included max weekly velocities, pre-order online sales, and daily unit sales.

Create genuine excitement among Pokémon fans: KPIs included engagement, and video views across organic and paid social channels; shopping clicks, and influencer engagement rate.

Cement OREO’s place in pop culture: KPIs included sentiment, broadcast & social earned media placements, organic social media impressions, and total earned media program impressions.

OREO has been ahead of the curve with powerhouse partnerships: Lady Gaga, Supreme, and Game of Thrones helped elevate OREO into popular culture through nationwide US launches. Yet other brands caught on, and as the category has become awash in surface-level partnerships, we had to evolve our approach.

Connecting with consumers via fandom requires a true understanding of what turns the casual consumer into a fan.

This project was inspired by the organic synergy between OREO and Pokémon and expanded upon by research of the Pokémon fandom. OREO and Pokémon are both centered on play and discovery: Pokémon fans love exploring and collecting the wide variety of Pokémon types as much as OREO fans love finding and trying everything new from OREO.

We created a unique campaign that makes both OREO and Pokémon fans go wild– Smashing previous records and creating the bestselling OREO LTE pack ever in the process.

The narrative at the heart of the collaboration was simple, yet persuasive – “OREO is teaming up with Pokémon to release a collectible cookie collaboration and the brand’s first-ever rarity scheme.”

We used earned storytelling to break the news, capturing immediate, widespread excitement. Outreach was purposeful – designed to secure coverage one week before the product became available to consumers to challenge fans to “catch them all” before they sold out. Campaign surround sound assets, such as OOH and unique launch video, were leveraged as added fodder for media, resulting in robust earned coverage.

As the partnership was centered around fans’ collectors’ mentality, it was critical to reach the Pokémon audience where they consume their news. This meant breaking into new media verticals, such as gaming, esports, entertainment & business, and leveraging paid influencers to reach Pokémon die-hards and generate added social chatter around the pack and “catch ‘em all”

The collab was announced with a playfully-pixelated animated video made entirely out of the iconic cookies. We started with hand-drawn animation to create a new character and to match Pikachu's design. Then, using custom algorithms, we turned our line-art into fully rendered OREO pixels.

Our out-of-home art installation featured a pixelated Pikachu made entirely out of over 8,000 3D-printed life-size OREO replicas. The larger-than-life mural was located on the high-traffic Venice Beach Boardwalk in Los Angeles. Each black and white section was printed separately over hundreds of hours and hand-assembled.

We paid tribute to the most beloved Pokémon with 16 unique cookie embossments featuring Pokémon such as Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle— BUT just like in the Pokémon world, some cookies are harder to find. Each pack is filled randomly and doesn't necessarily contain cookies with all 16 embossment designs. Every pack is a new chance to find them all.

OREO x Pokémon LTE packs crushed records for our previous LTE partnerships. The success of the launch has put OREO on the path to adding a whopping $1B in sales by 2023.

Dominated online buzz:

2.62B+ UVPM Total Program Impressions, topping Supreme LTE’s 2B impressions

1,644 Total Online, Broadcast + Social Placements

374 Broadcast Segments on Top 50 DMAs; over 200% more broadcast hits than Lady Gaga LTE

14M+ total organic social impressions

99% positive + neutral sentiment

Broke into new media verticals including: gaming, esports, entertainment, and business.

Created genuine excitement among Pokémon fans:

364k+ total organic social media engagements

1.5M+ total video views across organic social

29.3M+ views across paid social

14k+ Instagram shopping clicks, 12k over OREO LTE average

Influencer posts garnered 5.1% average engagement rate vs. Industry 2% benchmark

Like the rarest Pokémon cards, our rarest Mew cookies appeared on eBay for thousands of dollars