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

Pokémon is a powerhouse franchise with mass appeal that, like OREO, exists to fill the world with playful moments through our shared love of play and discovery. 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 transform the classic Limited Time Offer brand partnership into a sought-after cultural hit. To truly understand why Pokémon has devoted fans all over the world in addition to mass appeal, we dug deep into Pokémon’s official lore and uncovered the trigger points that make the Pokémon fandom go wild.

Objectives:

-Drive sales of this LTE pack

-Create genuine excitement among Pokémon fans

-Cement OREO’s place in pop culture

Pokémon has been around for 25 years and is always evolving so it never gets stale. While many Pokémon fans are children, teenagers, and their parents who already buy OREO, the remaining Pokémon fans are an untapped audience, falling in between the traditional markers of childhood and adulthood.

While Americans love OREOs as kids, as adults they often stop embracing the playfulness that makes the cookies special. Pokémon fans between being children and having children, represent an opportunity for consumers to discover new ways to enjoy OREO. With this partnership, we invited both frequent and infrequent OREO buyers to rediscover the playfulness of Pokémon and OREO alike.

Simply put, the power of discovery allows both brands' fanatics to ignite a child-like wonder in a world where most don’t have time to do so. This powerful commonality allowed us to activate both fandoms, honing in our fans’ love for the hunt.

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. Selective Laser Sintering 3D printing was used to make the replicas feel like a real cookie. Over 20,000 parts of each cookie component were printed separately over hundreds of hours and hand-assembled.

We paid tribute to the most beloved Pokémon with 16 unique cookie embossments — 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.

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