Oreo’s playful positioning, bold innovation and brand partnerships - Eugenia Zalis

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. loads of fun and I know you're going to enjoy it. Here it is. Eugenia Zales, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. Very happy to be here today. Great. Well, this is a bit of fun, isn't it? Because we get to talk about Oreo and of course, you're on a mission to stay playful, which is a lot of fun. But before we get into Oreo, I'd love to find out how your journey in marketing started. So, I mean, I really got into marketing. I think it was just the power of the brands and the ability to impact so many people. And that's why I love marketing and I love CPG.

1:01I joined Unilever 20 years ago and that was the highlight of my career. So yeah, it was really, you know, one for the books to be part of the team that worked on Campaign for Real Beauty and saw the transformation of a brand into, you know, the icon that it is today. So that was, you know, chapter number one, I guess, in Unilever, which was, you know, 20 years of, you know, lots of growth and fun. Now, Unilever is like one of those iconic organizations, brand led, very, very marketing led, you know, famous for brand building. What can we learn from how they approach marketing that you think, you know, people could benefit from hearing?

1:39So much I've learned. I think, you know, I always say I've learned the fundamentals. You know, that was my marketing school. So one of the key things that seem, you know, quite basic, but I think sometimes we forget, especially with all of the, you know, data driven measure results, is that at the heart of it, this is about people, right? And it's about understanding consumer needs and doing it in a way that feels, you know, very human. So I think a lot of the fundamentals about, you know, consumer centricity and the power of, you know, big ideas that have ability to disrupt and to touch people's hearts are at the heart of our industry.

2:23And that's something I've learned and, you know, stays very close to me. Now you casually mentioned in the introduction, you worked on Dove and probably one of the most, you know, biggest case studies in the kind of power of positioning and marketing and so on. what were the kind of significant points in the journey that kind of turned Dove into the brand that it is today? I think you know it was a it was clearly a journey but there was something very powerful in seeing the Dove transformation and the power of like people in leadership roles to really make that happen so when you think about you know stereotypical beauty and what was going on around the beauty industry, it kind of like became obvious after DAVE did it.

3:06And it was there, but it was like bubbling in the surface. And I think it just took a very strong, you know, powerful leadership at that time on the brand to really seize that opportunity and making it happen. So it's quite an inspiring case, I think, for marketeers around the world on the power that we have to, you know, really use the brands for good and to deliver against, you know, consumer needs. So very powerful leadership story, I think, above everything else. And which bits were you most proud of working on yourself? I mean, what bits? There was so much. It was a turmoil and I actually started working on the deodorants business.

3:51Through that transformation, they moved on to the hair business. probably one of the more like intellectually challenging thing at that point was once we had the power of the idea about you know real beauty real care real women was how to turn that from just something like an idea that people buy into to products that people want to buy so how to make sure that you connect the dots of a powerful idea to you know selling shampoo and conditioner and deodorants around the world so really that you know that linkage that real product linkage of understanding how that what that means in different categories and so that was that was a proud moment i think people often underestimate the power of ideas don't they in terms of how it can affect an organization i was working on an energy drink in the uk called lucasate and we ended up with we actually going i think we had like five years of decline and we were trying to turn it around and we came up with this idea called made to move which is basically that you know as human beings we're designed to move and exercise and you know stay fit and we realized our purpose actually was to help people move and the moment we came up with that you know we're all made to move idea suddenly it suddenly impacts everything the partnerships we do the way we present to our customers the way we engaged our employees it was really quite profound that a simple idea once it clicks and it's like based on a good you know consumer truth and it's true to the brand it's amazing how far it takes you exactly i love what you're saying and i think to me that's a bit of the power of dove that's the power of oreo and that's the power of all iconic brands right they are anchored on those like big ideas very deeply rooted in human needs and so simple right totally so simple so yeah i had the privilege of seeing the dove case and now the oreo case very closely So when did the Aurea opportunity come up for you?

5:46So, you know, my first chapter was Unilever. My second chapter was a few years of consulting. I spent five, six years here in New York consulting for different companies, doing some fractional CMO roles and really learned how easy it was to transfer ideas and skills and the power of like cross-polynization in a way of like, you know, following the old but twisting with something new. and how the power that that had for marketing. And I was in that second chapter of my life when the ORI opportunity came around. That was two years ago. And I do think I have the best job in the industry. I was going to say, doing a bit of research for this conversation, I'm like, you've had a lot of fun.

6:28Inventing products and coming up with great campaign ideas. It does look, certainly from the outside, like it's a lot of fun. You also, you changed the positioning, didn't you? So stay playful is now the kind of communication, at least the positioning that you've adopted. How important was that? Because you referenced it on Dove Real Beauty. How important has that been to what you're currently doing? Great question. And actually, you know, lots of similarities with Dove in the sense that, you know, Oreo is also a legacy heritage brand. More than 110 years we've been around. And over its history, it managed to stay relevant, stay strong, and stay at the forefront of culture, which is impressive for a brand this old.

7:07the evolution as you know as everyone knows who doesn't love and know an old oreo it was all around like parent children relationship and how the product at the center unlocked those moments of real intimate deep playful connections and and that campaign evolved into you know the same situation as seen from a mom's perspective so looking at you know spouses neighbors and you like opening the aperture of those playful moments until our current campaign, which is called Stay Playful. And the interesting journey is how, while staying true to who we are, the product truth of being a black and white sandwich cookie that begs to be played with, which is our product truth, and it's been the same product truth since the very beginnings, we we managed to elevate our campaign from something that was more about capturing a moment in time with the product at its center to elevating the whole brand and what does playful connections means for for more people for more spaces for more you know more collaborations and we've definitely managed to like unleash unleash the potential of the brand and there's much more that we have it's a good combination of kind of functional benefit and emotional isn't it the kind of two things together as you sort of reminded me of a campaign on a children's drink in the uk called fruit shoot and we end up with a position called go explore because what it because the product meant that kids didn't spill the drink it meant they could go out and take their drink with them and back of the car and you know um you know going playing in the garden and so go explore was their imagination but also the benefit particularly to mums and dads that when they had them in the car they weren't spilling it all over the back seat sort of thing so I love the kind of you know functional emotional benefit combined that that's I think it's one of the beauty about this brand how intrinsic the product is to the brand right and and their stories and you would have seen the Super Bowl campaign from last year which you know there's a sequel on air at the moment around a twist on it in the US it's called Trusted Twist in Europe but it's exactly that it's evolving our ritual of twist lick dunking which is just a celebration of how you know you eat an oreo and everyone eats an oreo differently i'd love to know how you eat i can definitely tell you how i eat mine and taking it to embedding it in culture in order to be topical around people making decisions and the true insight is that there's nothing more boring than making decisions sometimes as adults right so how can we inject a bit of playfulness with the brand and the product at its centre.

9:50Well, firstly, we should find out how do you eat yours? I don't eat it with my fork. I do eat it with my hands. I definitely twist it. I scrape it so I don't lick it. I use my teeth to scrape the cream and then I don't dunk. Is there any data on what people do? Do you know like the most common to the most unusual? It depends by market. So some markets we call them the dunker markets So markets that are really into milk and the dunk. Do you know the UK dunks? Because we've got a tradition of dunking in our coffee and tea, right? Yeah, exactly. That's like how we do biscuits. Not that much on milk, as much as the US.

10:27US is the ultimate, you know, dunker market. China, very much so as well. But then there's as many combinations of, you know, ways to eat an Oreo as people on this planet, really. And that's it, right? I think we were built on the twist-league dunk, which is very much a ritual that we embrace. But then as you would see in social, how people, you know, or it's a canvas for people to really have fun and connect with a cookie. There's tons of, you know, viral things around like the Oreo roulette, where you just, you know, throw the Oreo and depending on where it lands, people dunking in, you know, mustard, you know, all those weird things.

11:07But, you know, it's all good by us. You mentioned in your introduction as well about the brown being 110 odd years old. I had no idea, actually. And presumably where in the world you live influences kind of your perception as a brand, because in the UK it's relatively modern. Obviously in the US it's very, very old. So how do you manage the brand when I presume it's in different kind of stages of its life cycle all across the world? Exactly. As you said, we manage by, we cluster. We call it brand maturity. So US and China are our two strongholds markets where the brand has been around for longer.

11:43and then we have different brands that are in the intermediate stage and brands where we've recently launched less than 10 years ago. So we are really everywhere. It's our largest geographical footprint for Mondelē. So it's like a truly global brand and very iconic. But it's true that the perception of the brand and the development of the brand is quite different. So we try to do lots of strategy, frameworks, all of those boring stuff. But it's ultimately about understanding how to build the brand to its potential, depending on where the market is. Now, I know it's an American term, say playbook, right?

12:17But you literally probably do have a playbook for, you know, for Aureo, don't you? Do you have to alter the playbook depending on where in the world you are? And how much of it would be the same thing in the world? And how much of it would you change depending on the market? Perfect. Yeah, we call it the document is called the Aureo playbook. I was assuming so. If you don't have a playbook, then no one else is allowed to, right? It exists. And it's not one of those documents that sits in the cupboard, but we actually use it and we reinvent it every year. You know, it's a live document and we keep learning from, you know, our lead markets, US and China and the great work that happens there, as well as some of the youngest market like South Africa, who has had an amazing campaign last year around how do people eat your Oreo?

13:00You know, it's like Oreo your way and really celebrating the diversity of the country. and how people consume our Oreo. But yeah, that playbook exists and it gets updated. We're quite busy doing that. The beauty of Oreo, I also think it's the clarity on what the brand at its heart is, which we call it like the core components of the brand, like our brand foundations or brand values or beliefs, a very strong visual identity system with one of the strongest DBAs out there, right? These distinctive brand assets. But at the same time, we also have a very clear flex model where many of the insights and communication happens in our markets that are, of course, much closer.

13:46And that allows us to be really embedded in culture. And every market sees Oreo as their Oreo because it is. I can imagine. So break down what your distinctive assets are because I think part of the success is because it's round and different. But what are the distinctive assets? So we, you know, we've run quite a few studies on distinctive assets. We try to rerun them every few years. And broadly speaking, it's our color blue, very distinctive for Oreo. It's our cookie with milk, right? It's our combination. It's our very, very distinctive wordmark, our Oreo wordmark that has evolved and slightly changed, but has been quite distinctive for a while.

14:27And it's also our, you know, it's not part of our DBAs, but we have two very strong brand word like our tone of voice our personality and as i said before right our very very clear values that drive everything we do yeah i noticed with the word mark we've just had the super bowl here and you had a game day pack didn't you where you've kind of you know embossed you know footballs into the into the top of oreos i thought was very good that's right very subtle and that's the other thing about our product that is a canvas to for us to leave our brand purpose of connecting the world through playfulness which is we really have a lot of fun with flavors as everyone knows we have fun with embossment and we really bring the playful spirit to our collaborations as well where we try to surprise and delight our consumers so the cookie per se allows us to do you know things like you've just described or our collaboration with coca-cola that we did last year that was super fun and made people very happy all around the world just describe that because that's not a collaboration I'd have expected you to do but you know you're bringing two of the world's most iconic brands together how did that come about and and how did it kind of come to life as well so how did it come to life it really came you know back to my point about like people it came around you know people talking to each other and thinking you know let's do something together what could it be a group of us at Oreo you know flew over to Atlanta we met with the leadership team there visited the museum, were impressed by, you know, the amazing power of the brand.

16:00I think they were equally impressed by Oreo's capacity to, you know, do limited editions, flavors and really implement it, you know, exceptionally well in store. So there was a sheer like mutual admiration and a willingness to, you know, do something together and a belief that the brands at their heart had lots of things in common. You know, both brands are all about people and connections, you know, playfulness and happiness. So we were, you know, super confident we will pull something out and we just used our creative juices and we came up with, you know, a collaboration that, as you said, no one was expecting.

16:37And it definitely created a lot of fun for consumers last year. It was definitely one of the surprises of last year. I wasn't expecting it. But tell everyone who isn't familiar actually what the collaboration was. So the collaboration was at a brand level and at a product level. So we had the concept, the campaign idea was around besties for a limited time only. And the insight was all around understanding our brands, you know, anchored in connection, in happiness, in playfulness, and the need for Gen Z for connection. So really clear with who we were targeting and what was the consumer need. So we became besties.

17:15Coke and Oreo became besties for a limited time. Our teams became besties for a limited time. We really did. And we had a blast working on the collaboration. The limited editions were actually a Coke that tasted like Oreo. And an Oreo, it's a bit of a tongue twister. And an Oreo that tasted like Coke. I encourage you to try the product. I haven't tried it yet. I'm fascinated to try it. I did one years ago, actually, when I was working on, was it Tango? So Tango in the UK is like Fanta. And we did a collaboration with a chocolate bar called Crunchy. It kind of Crunchy is like honeycomb and chocolate.

17:56And so we did Tango-flavored honeycomb. It's absolutely amazing. I mean, people went wild for it. Because it gives you something novel to talk about and extra displays in store and do things you wouldn't normally do. But yeah, collaborations like that, you crash two brands together, can be quite powerful. Exactly. And I think we did it in a way that was not just about the product, but about the whole program and the customer experience end to end. We had this amazing activation with Spotify where you can merge playlists with your besties. So there was a lot of, you know, things for people to have fun with.

18:29Our Oreo cookie, you know, US version had one cookie that was red with a Coca-Cola embossment. It had the Coca-Cola syrup baked into our cookie. It had, you know, like pop candy or like fizzy effect on the cream. It looked red. So it was really a lot of fun for consumers. And I think everyone went wild. I can imagine. Trying it. Now, you must do a lot of innovation. I'm guessing, you know, it's a big brand, you know, global, lots of different markets. So is there a way that you approach doing innovation? You know, how do you evaluate what a good idea is and what a bad idea is? I think it depends on the type of innovation.

19:05So I'm not going to bore you with like playbooks or frameworks. or strategy, but I think we are very clear on the role of different innovations for the brand. So we don't treat an innovation like cakes, the Oreo cakes, in the same way that we treat the limited edition Oreo Coca-Cola, right? So we're very clear what innovation, what's the role of each different types of innovation around reaching new consumers or just, you know, giving it a, you know, giving consumers a bit more fun. So increasing, you know, their basket size, reaching new channels but we definitely do a lot of innovation i would say the one thing about oreo is we use our limited editions very smartly to deliver not only collaborations but fun flavors that are just they are fun and and you know if you go online you just see that our consumers go crazy just like trying to guess how are these mad people coming up with flavors you know guessing which is the new crazy flavor they're going to come up with and and the fact that they are limited just give them a nice reason to you know try it have fun um and it protects the health of our core business which is you know the of course the most significant well that's really interesting because i mean i think in my career there's always been this swing between must focus on the core and and protect the core and innovation seen as being you know kind of a bit wasted effort and then in other parts of my career innovation has been used to extend the appeal of the brand access new audiences and occasions and actually bolsters the core so how do you get that kind of balance between focusing in on the core oreo versus the limited editions for example i think some of the innovations we do we see them more like a core innovation that necessarily are true as other companies would define innovation which is opening up a new either sub-brand or a new platform and reaching new consumers some of our innovation is really close to the core and i think it has the beauty of feeding the core so it builds the brand equity it gives you extra displays it really brings back and fits the the core of the brand very nicely it's funny actually we put a few through the system one system as well just for fun to see what came back and it's quite interesting actually because um the top ones were exactly what you just said they kind of made Oreo even more Oreo so we had like the the most Oreo Oreo my favorite actually was the black out cake Oreo as well but that's because I love chocolate so but again it's kind of like playful twists to excuse the pun on the kind of core products isn't it that they were the ones that you know kind of particularly resonated because you're leveraging something people really love exactly we have things like what you just said right like the most Oreo Oreo now in the market the loaded oreo which is you know a lot of cream in the middle with like crushed up oreos we also do a lot of limited editions that are not reliant on a partner so things like you know we did in india i think it was the first market to do it called like say it with oreo so using the embossments of the oreo to just like have a little fun so lots of twists on the core cookie which are the more like closer in you know like leading with our brand first and then we have of course lots of fun flavors as you probably have on your list now the top one actually was um marshmallow actually uh smoreo which i thought was interesting so kind of marshmallow in the middle which because obviously a lot of people would have you know put oreo over a fire wouldn't they to sort of melt it and so that's interesting because it's playing on a routine that some people have um in the middle we actually my my daughter loves orio and she also loves snickerdoodle so that's her favorite that kind of came mid-table and at the bottom there's some crazy ones like pumpkin spice and tiramisu and stuff like that so it's interesting like you you know you've got a whole range from near in to kind of quite far out ideas exactly and some are what we call like fan favorites that we bring back because people absolutely love and they expect them in certain times of the year right so they have a little bit of a seasonal seasonal effect to it i'd love to know how you eat your oreo john you never know i didn't well i i i'm quite boring because i literally go straight through straight to it so rather than twist i just literally just bite through that's good so how many people do that where am i on the spectrum of i don't know i wouldn't be able to tell you the number but i think it's a british i think it's british thing maybe it might be british but I wouldn't say that that's boring.

23:33Okay, thank you. Please keep doing it. I love the fact that there's a whole lot of intel on how people eat their Oreo, so it's great. Love it. Now, you must go around the world and see a huge amount of innovation. What is the craziest innovation that you get to see in your category? Oh my God, I think Oreo has the craziest innovation award. So, I mean, there's lots of fun things, especially, you know, last year we were in Korea. You know, there's just so much fun to be had in food. which, you know, coming from beauty and personal care, this has been really something. For Oreo, though, I think the craziest one I've seen was spicy chicken wings, wasabi, all in China.

24:14In an Oreo? In an Oreo. That's mind-blowing. I remember going to China, sorry, not China, Japan. Japan's got some weird stuff going on. I mean, the amount of innovation they do. I mean, we were talking to, I think, the Suntory, and in the UK, you might do, I don't know, three or four big innovations a year they do one every single week they have weekly innovation cycles and then within days they decide if it's going to work or not and then they take it out again and they put put new one back in but i remember being at the airport and like kitkat had like wasabi flavored kitkat that's just the weirdest thing yeah it's quite weird yeah in the us we did this collaboration with ritz which was quite wild as well right a ritz the savory biscuit is that yeah it's quite a mix of savory and sweet yeah and i would put coca-cola up there right on some of the craziest flavors i think so so which which of the crazy innovations has surprised you by being successful that you didn't think was going to succeed because i think it's because it because one of these things we kind of debate it's like you know you want to be different but not too different you want to be familiar and close to the brand but you want to also be novel so there's often a tension isn't there between kind of how much do i push it and occasionally some weird concept I mean and honestly I would say coca-cola not that I didn't believe in it of course but it's one that initially you're like oh is this really gonna taste good and you tried and I was pleasantly surprised I think it's an amazing taste and a great interpretation of a coca-cola so it really surprised me I suppose vanilla coke has has succeeded in the past hasn't it so there is a little bit of history of something a little bit of you know association there between the two yeah yeah you mentioned earlier didn't you about um about Super Bowl last year and one of the standout uh ads last year I think was the one you did and what I loved about it was the fact that you know most Super Bowl ads got celebrities in you know they're kind of high drama and but you kind of get lost in what on earth is being advertised but what I love about we did last year is absolutely obvious that it was from you um so just for anyone who hasn't seen your campaign from last year just talk through the idea because I I think the idea is that it brilliantly executed and really brings home the point about playfulness.

26:24Very good. I'm glad you liked it. It scored very well, by the way. It was, I think, a four and a half star on our system one scale. Yeah, I think it's number four on effectiveness. I think even on the rankings on number eight. It's very good. It's definitely on the top 10 of the ads last year. And it kind of follows what we were talking about before around the beauty of Oreo and the product truth of playing with an Oreo. So really the insight is around, you know, the kind of like lots of decisions that happen day in, day out where we need to make a decision. And that's actually quite adult and quite serious.

27:00And you kind of like sometimes wish like someone else would make that decision for you. So that's that's really where the insight comes from. And the way we executed it for the Super Bowl was relooking at the history of humanity almost through the lens of, you know, twisting on an Oreo. and how decisions were made with the twist of an Oreo, which was super fun and very appropriate for the Super Bowl with Kris Jenner, of course, as the cherry on top, trying to guess who was going to win the Super Bowl. But we are now taking that idea to more everyday situations as well, like two girls watching Netflix and deciding whether they should binge watch all night the show or go to sleep and how they twist an Oreo to make that decision.

27:44and the same campaign lives in Europe under a different tagline but it's just you know similar idea around trusted twist which is you know twisting an oreo to make decisions like you know a girl challenging the mom you know to choose her outfit to go to work or you know and of course the oreo twisted that side and the mom goes to work dressed up as a mermaid so lots of you know we can have lots of fun by just like bringing the playfulness of the oreo to you know people's lives I mean, what I love about it is it can only be you, right? Because you've got that history of the twist. And there's endless possibilities with where you could take that, you know, online, in-store, the amount of scenarios that it could solve, world peace, negotiation.

28:27I mean, you imagine it's endless, isn't it, in terms of the application of it? It is, it is. It's a big idea with big legs. Yeah. So we expect to see some more of it, presumably. Expect to see more of it. More coming. Now, talking about Super Bowl, I think you must be one of the only brands in the history of Super Bowl to win a Cannes Lion for a tweet as well. Just explain what happened. This is back in 2013, isn't it? This is back before I joined the brand, of course. But internally, we talk about it like that was the start of the social era for Oreo where we really, I mean, the brand was reactive to culture in real time.

29:02And back then, it was not something that was a common thing in the marketing industry. and very much anchored on the product and the brand, right? So I think what enabled that to happen was, you know, a real understanding of what the brand's all about and the willingness to just, like, engage in cultural conversations, which is something we carry to this day with our social channels and Oreo really kind of, like, shaping culture and being, you know, in the front of many conversations. But it was, yeah, one of those historical, you know, I wish I was there, but... Yeah, it was. For anyone who wasn't watching Super Bowl, I missed it at the time, but I read the case afterwards.

29:42But I think it's 2013 and there was an over 30-minute outage. So the power went out in the game. And in that 30 minutes, you put up a tweet saying you can still dunk in the dark with a kind of black background. It had an Oreo just in the corner of the image. It was very clever. And it had tens of thousands of shares. It was retweeted like crazy, yes. I mean, I don't know. It's always hard to know with kind of media valuations, but it claimed 500 million equivalent in media. I always find those statistics a bit crazy, but incredible. And won a Cannes Lion that year. It did. For one tweet. It did.

30:18It's quite impressive, isn't it? The cheaper Cannes Lion. I was going to say, the cheapest Cannes Lion in the history of Cannes Lions, definitely. Now, talking of Cannes, that's where you and I met, because you were out there talking about humour, weren't you? You were on a panel talking about humour, and I think it was called Humours Just Left The Chat. um now you're a brand that leans very much into humor why is human not used more do you think in in communication these days yeah and that was last year i remember and and we had that great conversation with other brands as well like if everyone knows how powerful humor is and we all read the same reports like why is it that not only we don't use it enough but it's in decline right and and there's a few things we hypothesize right one is that it's just hard it's it's more difficult.

31:01It's difficult to control. And especially the, you know, the topic I was asked to bring to the panel was, is it that global brands find it even harder? And I would say yes, because especially if you're thinking about one global production, one edit, or not even global production, but like the need to control every piece of work that happens around the world, that's nearly impossible because as we all know humor is very culturally driven we don't laugh at the same things right the cultural norms the nuances the behaviors i think in that panel we talked about the office right the show from netflix that is one it's i think it's the most streamed but it has how many different versions and when you really study the different versions actually the jokes are different right people are laughing at different things what an office looks like in different parts of the world is different what happens at the you know like coffee place is different um but what we do at Oreo that I think has been super successful and useful for us is to really identify at the core not only values and beliefs but as a very clear set of tone of voice principles so we worked really hard with the markets with our agency on how does Oreo show up and what's our tone of voice.

32:20And we captured it in three distinct ideas that have two kind of like conflicting words at its heart. And we spend a lot of time looking at examples. What does that look like? What does it look like when it's too much of it? What does it look like when it's too little? And when we're being a little bit safe, what are the boundaries? What are the guardrails? We literally went to our room and had like a million posted, one of those like old fashioned, real workshops. we brought examples from around the world and comms and then we encouraged every market to run that same workshop with their own local comms looking at examples from their markets so those guard rates are super helpful now that we have guard rates we can really blow it out and be humorous in a way that makes sense for the brand globally as a global icon but also resonates with the consumer in the market yeah so that's how we kind of like went about it but it's really it is one of the barriers I think yeah I mean humor is amazingly powerful I mean there's an old GK Chesterton quote about humor can get in the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle which I think is absolutely lovely and in fact a system when we measure emotion of people feel when they watch an ad and happiness is usually the biggest emotion which is what you want to achieve but we looked at the types of happiness it turns out there are lots of different types of you know feeling happy it always makes me laugh this when we show people because the number one type of happiness do you know what it is schadenfreude oh no so exactly number two actually was amusement uh and then right at the bottom is things like pride for others and so on so even i mean there's 15 different types of happiness we we track but anyway but the point is humor i mean schadenfreude's a form of humor as well the top two types of happiness that are linked to business effects are you know our humor so you know we know humor is important we know it's powerful but we don't see many brands leaning in and that's the nuanced work we did right i mean is it slapstick is it satire is it realistic is it imaginative like we started really trying to break it apart right as precise as we could so it's the you know freedom within a framework you know kind of like creativity kind of like really is unleashed when you have a tight understanding totally so that's what we try you write about the freedom in the framework as well because I was doing some work, I think it was on Pizza Hut and it was a very funny, it was American film, it was very, very funny.

34:42We tested it and it was five star and the UK team weren't quite sure. So they said, oh, can you test it in the UK? And we're going to roll it out in France as well. And it's five star here, three star in the UK, one star in France. But you could see literally that the humour just didn't translate. And the personality as well because the person they were using was well known here, a little bit known in the UK, totally not known in France. So again, you know, the personality, the in-jokes, the cultural references, all those things, you know, it's all part of humour, isn't it? The fact that we all understand the context of the joke.

35:15Yeah, exactly. It's very rare, I think, that you have those universal jokes that everyone laughs at, right? But it's more like the exception. Yes, yes. I think maybe Hollywood films or something, you know, where it's like blockbusters that are probably, you know, the world over, or maybe people falling over or something. Like slapstick. Slapstick is probably the one case that's a little bit different. So bring us up to date with this year then. What did you do this year for Super Bowl? So we were not at Super Bowl this year. We took a year off. You did a collaboration with Post Malone, didn't you?

35:50We did. We were not at Super Bowl exactly. It was our big bet for Q1, which is... I actually have cookies for you, John. Oh, this is great. We're going to do this live on air. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it live on air. This is good. Let's do it. Now, most people when they do celebrity like partnerships, they just have the celebrity like appear on the ad, right? But apparently Post Malone had a big involvement in this, didn't he? That's right. Yeah? So tell me about that. Yes, he said it, right? He claimed. He's like, I think this is the best Oreo ever. So that's what he said. I'm going to try it now.

36:23Not that I haven't tried it before. We're going to put Post Malone to the test now. Post Malone to the test. So he really wanted an Oreo twist. So he designed this Oreo. Of course, we helped him. But it was him who developed this Oreo, which is salted caramel and shortbread. You're going to see the swirl inside. If you twist it, I know you don't twist. I'm going to try twisting now. I can confirm it does smell very good, actually. There's definitely salted caramel going on there. So there's a lot going on on this Oreo. It's one of the most, like, flavorful Oreos. Really tasty. Lots of things going on in your mouth.

36:57like posty himself right okay so here we go for the taste test i'm going to go for how i did at home i'm doing it as well

37:07now i'm a massive salted caramel fan anyway so producer james will tell you a salt you know a nice caramel latte is like my first drink of the day isn't it what you said is very true around how this is not just like a promotion right like slapping posty on the point of sale right this is a genuine collaboration and we bring kind of like the word of oreo to posty and posty to oreo and i think it's a similar principle to how we executed coca-cola right i think it's two things coming together really and is this us only or have you done something this one is us only but we do have something up coming very exciting that's going to be global uh we do a few that are more you know local like as i was talking about wednesday in brazil for example they did a huge collaboration with a wednesday show and that was brazil only and we're now doing a collaboration with pokemon in southeast asia so we have a combination of like some really powerful local ones that we work on and then some global ones having lots of fun i can see what's the kind of creative process you go through to come up with these ideas you know i think there's there's a bit of like an art and a science on the process I would say around you know we were joking about the numbers we definitely look at numbers but we also look at you know the potential for being buzzworthy and you know reaching new audiences and tapping onto fandoms and whether it's aligned to the brand values and it makes sense so definitely you know chaotic and art and science but you know it makes sense at the end well a lot of I mean a lot of this innovation is often about creating pr isn't it and and noise around the brand that wouldn't be there if you'd done something just such the goal that's exactly right we work a lot with our you know advertising agencies pr agencies digital agencies everyone working together and pr is a big big component behind some of the collaborations for sure i want to talk to you a little bit about kind of leadership style and what you've learned on your journey obviously you know 20 years you talked about at unilever now leading Oreo globally in a big organization, big brand.