Oreo rebuilds the Forbidden City from 10,600 cookies — 3M views in 3 days

By 2019 Oreo had been in China for 23 years, but co-branding usually meant little more than a logo swap. With the guochao (national-trend) wave rising, the brand wanted a collaboration with the Forbidden City IP in which the cookie itself became the medium.

Rebuild the Forbidden City from 10,600 real Oreo cookies in a 28-second stop-motion film, then launch six Chinese-flavored biscuits with Palace Museum co-branding.

BlueFocus Digital Shanghai spent a 26-day build with a cross-border visual-effects team, stacking 10,600 cookies brick by brick to recreate the palace in a 28-second stop-motion film; six new Chinese flavors launched with packaging drawn from the Palace Museum's Twelve Beauties scrolls, plus an interactive H5, a gift music box and a livestreamed roundtable.

The film drew nearly 3 million views within three days of launch, and the campaign won the Grand Prix (全场大奖) for integrated marketing at the 2019 Jin Tou Shang Business Creative Awards (金投赏), which received 3,310 entries that year.

In May 2019, Oreo's China team teamed up with 'Zhen de Xinyi · Palace Museum Food' (朕的心意·故宫食品) for the campaign 'Qibing Huangshang — Oreo Enters the Palace'. Rather than another logo-swap co-brand, lead agency BlueFocus Digital Shanghai proposed building the Forbidden City itself out of biscuits: 10,600 real Oreos, stacked over a 26-day build into a 28-second stop-motion film.

Six new Chinese-flavored Oreos (green tea, osmanthus, honey and more) launched with packaging inspired by the Palace Museum's Twelve Beauties scrolls, alongside an interactive H5, a palace-themed gift music box and a livestreamed roundtable with food writers and the brand ambassador. Poster copy played on cookie-texture puns and palace-speak, turning the product itself into shareable content.

The film drew nearly 3 million views within three days of launch, and the campaign took the Grand Prix for integrated marketing at the 2019 Jin Tou Shang Business Creative Awards, beating 3,310 entries from 691 companies. It became a reference case for heritage-IP co-branding in China, with the cookie doing the storytelling instead of a logo.

It made the product the medium: the cookie was both the material of the palace and the thing being sold, so the ad and the SKU were the same story.

A hard physical constraint — 10,600 pieces in 26 days — turned a marketing idea into a verifiable spectacle that press and fans wanted to see.

Six real new flavors gave the spectacle a commercial payload, converting attention into shelf products instead of a one-off stunt.

It answered the guochao wave with depth: the Palace Museum IP entered through history and craft rather than a superficial red-and-gold logo.

Deep co-branding compounds: when the product itself rebuilds the partner's icon, one idea yields a film, packaging, social content and sales — but the build must be real enough to verify.

Oreo kept the 'biscuit as architecture' play — the cookie music-box mechanic from its 2017 Tmall Super Brand Day returned in the 2019 Palace Museum gift set, and later Chinese-market work kept mixing western playfulness with Chinese iconography. The Forbidden City build is still cited in Chinese award retrospectives as a benchmark for heritage co-branding, and the six Palace Museum flavors became collectible SKUs.