Oreo’s Super Bowl Commercial Debuts Exciting New Catchphrase
Super Bowl commercials are the holy grail of advertising. If your product is lucky enough to get one, it is a huge opportunity to bring attention and interest to your product. Watching the Super Bowl ‘for the commercials’ is a cliché for a reason. Viewers all over the U.S. really do sit down and watch football’s biggest night in the hopes of seeing some of the most entertaining, funny, out of the box commercials produced all year. It’s the one time people actually seek out commercials. As such, it’s an ideal way to kick off a new campaign, and that’s exactly what Oreo is doing this year with its new catch phrase “twist on it.”
As this Vulture piece notes about the Oreo ad, “perhaps the only thing more exciting in American culture than a new movie franchise is when a company debuts a new catchphrase.” And this is a particularly entertaining one. The ad depicts well known cultural moments, imagining that the people involved made their decisions about what to do by twisting an Oreo cookie and seeing which side the cream stays on. Kind of like tossing a coin, but far more delicious.
In the ad, the guards at the gates of Troy twist on whether to let in the wooden horse; some government guys in suits twist on whether to report seeing a flying saucer in an Area 51 type of scene; perhaps most amusingly, Kris Jenner twists on whether to agree to put her family’s life on TV. If you’re having fun with these, there’s also a 90-second version. The ad wraps up with a bunch of angels in heaven realizing that they could make their decisions for the puny humans they watch over by twisting as well.
The catchphrase is fun, and provides endless fodder for more “twist on it” moments in future commercials. Who knows what will be twisted on next? It’s a storyline that’s both enjoyable and easy to follow. Paramount+’s Super Bowl ad is a good contrast as it attempts its own funny story, complete with popular TV characters, but ultimately falls flat — at some point you stop chuckling at Arnold’s football head, and start wondering why these characters are trying to climb a mountain in the first place.
Perhaps more than just an excellent set-up for future ads, the new catchphrase takes a step further what a lot of Oreo eaters already do. I, myself, remember being a kid and twisting Oreos with friends to see whether the cream would remain unbroken or split between the two halves. The campaign likely sparks the same nostalgia in others. Additionally, it gives today’s kids their own activity with Oreos to get excited about. If the catchphrase becomes ubiquitous, I wouldn’t be surprised to find kids twisting their Oreo cookies to see which side the cream stays on. Over on the social media side, we may even see folks posting about what they twist on, something that could be initiated if the company launches a “twist on it” hashtag contest. If nothing else, the video is hilarious enough that it’s bound to get shared across platforms all on its own.
The bar for a Super Bowl commercial is high. It’s one that pushes companies to make big swings, but that doesn’t mean they always hit. (Check out this disastrous Super Bowl commercial from a few years ago for the canceled-after-one-season CBS TV show Clarice, a Silence of the Lambs spin-off.) Yet, Oreo actually has a history of conquering this yearly commercial competition. A social media post about how “you can still dunk in the dark” during a black out that occurred during 2013’s Super Bowl went viral. As this Wired piece notes, this didn’t just happen by accident. Oreo had a whole staff assembled during the game, ready to respond in real time to any developments. Well, it seems once again that the cookie company knows how to properly tackle this night for marketing. When the game is over, and all the Super Bowl parties clear, I expect we’ll all wake up the next morning to find Oreo’s “twist on it” ad to be one of the clear standouts.
