Oreo has today rolled out a new mobile game — or marketing campaign, depending on how you look at it — called the “Oreo Dunk Challenge”. Essentially, the game uses a variety of mobile web technologies, including some from Google, to let players fling a virtual Oreo across the world for the ultimate dunk into a glass of milk thousands of miles away.
It’s an amusing concept, but it’s all the more interesting when you realize just how much the Mountain View company had to do with its inception…
When you load up the mobile web app (located over at oreospacedunk.com), you’ll be asked to take a photo of a real-life Oreo — although you can also just pull a photo on Google Images if you don’t have any Oreos on hand. From there, after verifying you are a paying Oreo customer, the app asks for your location for the “launch site”. You then fling your phone as hard as you can, and you watch your cookie fly into the air and land… somewhere on the other side of the world.
Reports say that it was made primarily by marketing agency 360i, but other agencies like Google’s in-house agency The Zoo, Carat, and Jam3 also played a part in its development. The obvious Google tie-in technology-wise is that the bulk of the game’s animation uses Google Earth imagery to show where your Oreo fling is coming from and where it’s going.
And Google isn’t doing anything to hide its involvement, either. When you fire up the app, you’re presented with the familiar “Created with our friends at Google” tagline that basically just means that Google partnered with the company that made whatever product it is that you’re using. We’ve also seen this tagline on the packaging for the new LG watches and a dress made with Ivyrevel.
While the game is a fun little marketing gimmick, I think the bigger story here is that Google is actively working with Mondelez, the company behind Oreo, on marketing efforts. The forthcoming branding of Android ‘O’ will certainly be a monstrous marketing effort of its own, and the release of this game shows that — at the very least — the two companies are already collaborating at a level that seems pretty likely to lead to Android ‘O’ getting the name of Mondelez’ namesake cookie brand.
And, if we’re honest, there aren’t really any other good dessert names that start with O, anyway.
Apologies for the iOS screenshots, but the game was — ironically — not working on my Pixel for some reason:
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