2019 Winners & Shortlists

Background.

Oreo is the world’s number one cookie, so it comes as no surprise that it enjoys an incredibly high awareness level. In KSA however, that translates to just 47% household penetration. Why? Oreo’s consumption is primarily driven by kids. Even though adults contribute the highest volume to the business, they’re not the ones enjoying the cookie. Therefore, we have potential to grow Oreo’s share by expanding our consumers beyond kids, to everyone. Research showed that Oreo is highly associated with kids mainly due to its marketing approach; the brand is known to use cartoony animations in its advertising, to hero children in the creative copies, and to promote the child-like ritual of twist-lick-dunking every cookie into a glass of milk. Knowing that, we wanted to shift the brand perception of OREO from being a children’s cookie… to everyone’s cookie.

Describe the creative idea.

Oreo is a token of wonder across the world. The GCC region is rich in cultural diversity due to the large expat community, which leaves little room for commonalities. We wanted everyone to identify as Oreo People by recognizing that the cookie is for everyone, regardless of age, background and interests. Rather than glossing over their differences with a one-size-fits-all approach, we tackled them head-on. We created content catering to a range of interests on YouTube, and deliberately targeted them with content seemingly contrasting their search. Someone interested in Bollywood music would instead be served a pre-roll featuring a heavy-metal rocker, and someone interested in Arab music would be served a pre-roll featuring a rapper and so forth. It was then revealed that the two had something in common: a shared love for Oreo. With a humorous and playful twist, we positioned Oreo as a cookie that transcends divergence

Describe the strategy.

Our ambition was to connect Oreo with everyone, and we recognized that personalized creative was the way to achieve this. We harnessed audience signals from Google to understand our users’ behavior & content preference in order to empower our content creation. We launched the campaign on TV, but the big bang was amplified online. On social media, Oreo was everywhere. - We curated user-generated content that illustrated different ways of enjoying an Oreo. - We developed 3 Snapchat filters as the platform is wildly popular among Saudi Youth. On Anghami, the leading music-streaming platform in MENA, we adapted Oreo's existing 'People' jingle for a music-loving audience, highlighting that people have varying tastes in music, but a common love for Oreo. Our most innovative execution revolved around bespoke and dynamic YT copies: with the help of Google insights, we released 48 personalized pre-rolls contextually matched to videos within multiple categories

Describe the execution.

We worked closely with Google’s insights team to identify the top content categories consumed by our target audience on YouTube: music, movies, humor, sports, TV shows, and gaming. We then zoomed in further to each category for a more granular understanding of their content preferences – discovering, for example, that Pop, R&B, and Jazz were the most popular subcategories within the music genre. For each, we developed a bespoke pre-roll, and capitalized on Google’s targeting capabilities by matching each creative to the subcategory it was created for. On the surface, the ads all looked the same: the creative treatment (background, props, brand colours) were maintained across all to ensure consistency. However, the content of each pre-roll was tailored to the user’s interest. In this way, we were able to foster a perfect balance between mass reach and hyper-relevant content to produce personalized creative at scale.

List the results.

The results were wonderfilled! It was evident that viewers appreciated the relevant and entertaining content served to them as our View Through Rate skyrocketed to a high 49% versus an average of 25% that we have seen across the rest of our ads. We conducted a brand lift study on YouTube that revealed a 22% uplift in ad recall of the dynamic personalized ads vs. an 11% uplift from the generic ads from. Most importantly, total Oreo value sales grew by 7.7% in KSA from August to November (pre Oreo People campaign and post Oreo People campaign), and 13.4% in UAE. All in all, this campaign showed that despite everyone's differences, we are all Oreo People!