The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2019
Oreo builds the Forbidden City from 10,600 cookies — 760K boxes sold day one
For Tmall Super Brand Day, Oreo × Palace Museum turned imperial recipes into six flavors and built the Forbidden City from 10,600 cookies in a film.
Oreo (奥利奥) · Mondelez International (亿滋) · Palace Museum (故宫博物院)
What it had to solve
Oreo had run Tmall Super Brand Day since 2015 but was still seen as a kids' snack in China. In 2019, with the Palace Museum's cultural IP booming among young consumers, Mondelez China's brief was to make a century-old American cookie feel native to Chinese heritage and turn the annual brand event into a cultural statement.
How it works
In May 2019, Oreo's fourth Tmall Super Brand Day took the form of a cultural collaboration: six imperial-inspired flavors created with 朕的心意·故宫食品 (Palace Museum food brand), a two-tier gift box printed with the museum's 'Twelve Beauties' painting, and a cardboard Oreo music box that changes tune when you take a bite of the 'record'.
The centerpiece was a 28-second film, 奥利奥-故宫 东方史诗篇, in which the Forbidden City rises from 10,600 Oreos and passes through four seasons, day and night, with motifs of 天圆地方 (round heaven, square earth) and yin-yang phases. The agencies Blue Digital and Redhorse Media made it in 26 days, mixing stop-motion and 3D animation and scoring it with Chinese bells, zithers and drums over Western strings.
The results were immediate and quantified: 760,000+ boxes sold on launch day (May 23), 260,000+ new flagship-store followers — more than the brand attracted in all of 2018 — and 780M views for the cookie-city film by day's end. The film won the 2019 ROI Festival (金瞳奖) Silver Award.
The campaign grew out of Tmall's program matching museums with brand partners, and Mondelez Greater China's president called it a milestone for Oreo 'to deeply tap into the Chinese local market and win the hearts of consumers'.
Why it lands
- Making the cookies the building material merges product and concept: the film advertises the flavors, the packaging and the brand at once.
- Restaging imperial recipes as Oreo flavors positions a foreign snack as a respectful guest of Chinese culture rather than a logo-print mashup.
- The two-tier 'Twelve Beauties' box and the music box give the collaboration physical artifacts that people post about, extending the film's shelf life.
- A 28-second film built from 10,600 cookies is visible craftsmanship, so the campaign spread on pure craft grounds.
What it did
Day one: 760,000+ boxes sold on Tmall, 260,000+ new followers for the flagship store (more than the brand gained in all of 2018), and 780M views for the cookie-Forbidden City film by day's end. The film won the 2019 ROI Festival (金瞳奖) Silver Award and became a reference model for Chinese museum-brand collaborations.
What you can take
A cultural collaboration lands hardest when the product becomes the medium: cookies were the bricks, so IP, product and story became a single artifact consumers could taste, watch and share.
Since then
The campaign became the template for Oreo's annual Super Brand Day and a reference point for Chinese museum-brand collaborations; Tmall's museum-matching program continued pairing cultural IP with brands. Jing Daily praised the concept as holistic while noting the Forbidden City's own star power makes isolating the campaign's contribution hard. The film kept circulating on Chinese ad-archive sites and won the 2019 金瞳奖 Silver.
Sources
- Oreo, Forbidden City Make Cookies Fit for an Emperor
- How Oreo & the Palace Museum Won Hearts in China
- 奥利奥--故宫 东方史诗篇 (2019 银奖获奖页)
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