Happy Ads built a game for OREO that had Pakistan's creative community competing, sharing, and awarding it. 'Cookie Rookie' didn't just advertise OREO. It became OREO.
The Challenge
OREO — Mondelez Pakistan's iconic sandwich cookie and one of the most recognisable brand identities in the world — needed a digital campaign that matched the brand's global reputation for playful, unexpected creativity. In Pakistan, where OREO's market presence was growing and the brand was investing to drive trial among younger audiences, a standard display or video campaign would be functionally invisible.
The creative brief was intentionally challenging: build something as distinctive and playful as the OREO brand itself. The brand's iconic visual identity — the bold black cookie, the white cream filling — and its global 'Play with OREO' creative platform demanded an execution that was genuinely surprising: not just visually distinctive, but interactively surprising. Something you would tell a friend about.
The format needed to be brand-safe (OREO's audience skews young and family), technically deliverable within standard ad infrastructure, and genuinely fun — not just gamified. Gamified advertising that isn't actually fun generates low completion and negative brand association. A fun branded game generates positive association, replay, and sharing.
The Solution
Happy Ads' creative-tech team built the 'Cookie Rookie' game — a branded HTML5 playable ad built entirely within OREO's iconic black-and-white visual world. The game mechanic was distilled from what makes OREO culturally distinctive: the ritual of the cookie itself. Playing the game involved OREO's brand world in a way immediately recognisable to any OREO consumer — the iconic cookie shapes, the brand's graphic language, the playful interactivity of the 'Play with OREO' platform.
The 'Cookie Rookie' title was itself a piece of brand communication: positioning the player as a rookie in the world of OREO expertise, with the game as the path to cookie mastery. Each level introduced new complexity while keeping the core mechanic — always rooted in OREO's visual language — immediately recognisable.
The campaign's creative community response was the strongest of any Happy Ads execution: 114 Behance views and 3 community appreciations demonstrate that the Cookie Rookie crossed the threshold from advertising into creative work that advertising professionals genuinely admired
Key Results
114
Behance Views — #2 in Portfolio
3
Community Appreciations — Awarded
HTML5
In-Banner — OREO Brand World
Play
with OREO — Global Platform, Local Execution
Key Insights
