What Made Oreo’s “Daily Twist” Campaign So Engaging?

Posted by Mai Bruun Poulsen Oct 12th, 2012

What in my opinion is one of the best campaigns of the year just ended: The Oreo “Daily Twist” campaign.

To celebrate the centennial of the world’s most iconic biscuit, Oreo teamed up with agency 360i to create a social and digital campaign with 100 days of creative and whimsical visualisations of “America’s favourite cookie” from June 25th until October 2nd. Each day, Oreo shared an image of a cookie depicting all thinkable (and unthinkable) events of the day in question, such as important milestones or current events.

Using milestones and popular-culture events to engage

Using milestones is in general a great way of creating engagement, both through location specific celebrations and worldwide events, as a large number of people can easily relate to this. Oreo has brought this way of engaging fans to a new level with the “Daily Twist” campaign with 100 days of milestone celebrations, making people curious and wanting to tune in to see what creative and quirky way Oreo had decided to celebrate an event. Besides the “Daily Twist” site where users could suggest their “twist”, the campaign was driven on Facebook, but also on Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest.

Some events are of course more predictable than others, such as the Olympics, Labour Day and the beginning of new school year, but most of the celebrated events were surprising, such as Talk like a pirate day, Elvis Week and the Mars Rover landing. Even though some of the cookie designs were obviously planned ahead, you could sense that the Oreo design team monitored trending topics and enhanced current events, such as the premiere of Batman “The Dark Knight Rises” and the release of the iPhone5 ensuring that the content was always relevant and timely.

Combining the offline and online worlds

The campaign finale took place at Times Square with the last “Daily Twist” cookie design created in real-time in a pop-up agency, based on ideas from consumers suggested through social media or from people showing up on Times Square for the finale. Oreo’s creatives showed the process in real-time with a video displaying how they were putting together the final “Daily Twist”. People could then vote for their favourite Oreo iteration among the finalists through social media. The result was a cookie celebrating the first high-five displayed on a digital billboard.

This combination of the online and offline worlds and the mix of social and traditional marketing allowed for a greater experience and showed that Oreo is mastering the integrated marketing approach that I recently wrote about here on the blog.

Why was the campaign so engaging?

The campaign had a turbulent kick-off with the Gay Pride rainbow cookie, which I’ve previously blogged about. The rainbow cookie ended up sparking a boycott at the same time as it actually doubled the fan growth and drew a picture of Oreo as a courageous brand with strong values. Maybe beginning the campaign with the controversial cookie was in fact a strategic choice in order to drive awareness of the campaign and make it go viral from day 1?

Oreo’s ability to deliver easily consuming content adjusted to current trends and popular topics is in my opinion the most important factor in the success of the “Daily Twist” campaign. The content is relevant, timely, simple, humorous and sharable – without ever begging for likes, comment and shares. All channels used for the campaign form a synthesis through an integrated marketing approach, combining digital and traditional advertising with a real-world experience.

The campaign places the product in the centre but without actually being self-centrered, as a lot of the celebrated events are global and based on global values – and those that are unique celebrations make you want to investigate what the image refers to. The fact that the post with the biggest reach during the campaign was the cookie honouring the birth of the Chinese panda Shin Shin’s baby proves this. Cindy Chen, Director of Marketing for Oreo at Kraft Foods, told ABC News: “As a result of such strong global engagement the post’s reach was 4,409,344 — more than 21,000 higher than Pride.”

So exactly how successful was the campaign?

The “Daily Twist” campaign has had an enormous reach and led to thousands of user-generated Oreo twists and cookie conversations building a strong brand-fan relationship.

According to Socialbakers, the Facebook shares on Oreo’s brand page has increased by over 4400% from the previous three months before the “Daily Twist” campaign began: