By Malay Desai
From: USA, by Wieden+Kennedy
The cookie giant’s wham-bam 35-seconder shows an argument over Oreo between two guys escalating to a violent fracas. Beginning with whispers over whether the best part of Oreo is the cream or the cookie, the grown up men begin hitting each other, to be joined by others at the library throwing and tearing down stuff. Some fire men and later the police too are shown arriving, trying to douse the riot. Everyone in the spot talks in a whisper, including the cops and even the final voiceover, which hints at choosing a side on an Instagram promotion.
Why we like
Take the excitement and viewership of an IPL final and multiply it by at least three, and you have the National Football League (NFL)’s game day buzz. One of the top sporting events of the year is also the most watched, and ‘teasers’ to the ads that run between kickoff and the final whistle begin over two weeks prior. Now, the bad news – nearly all the TVCs under-delivered this year, in fact we thought some of them were downright terrible.
The only spot that stood out, and that too only in relative terms, was this one and we’re picking it for the sheer action it packed in the half-a-minute or so of super-premium airtime. The idea is as old as cookie advertising itself, and you might recall the ‘coffee v/s toffee’ spot of the Doordarshan days on the same lines. The added dimension, however, is that a whisper is louder than a shout, and we’d like to believe this was thought out as a metaphor to be among all the NFL noise.
The studio production of how the violence in the library escalates is worthy enough to grab attention and induce a chuckle or two. The Instagram mention in the product window is smart too, a desi brand would dream of such social media penetration here.
What Oreo ALSO did that night is something we’re more kicked about. When the game had a small blackout (yes, so much for being the first world!), their digital agency created a print ad which said ‘You can still dunk in the dark’ and shot it online in a matter of minutes. The results of this were so staggering (14,000 retweets and 20,000 likes in hours), it is evident that this one-hour job will be remembered for longer than the TVC, which may have cost many times more.
Social media advertising is most effective when top executives understand the medium and give super-fast approvals. In any other conventional approach, by the time the client responds to the idea, the audience has well gone home.
To watch the spot, feed this link in your browser - Goo.gl/QyhUy
