The Ridiculous Number Of Digital Oreos It Took To Make This Game Of Thrones Promo
In 2019, when fans were readying themselves for the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, Oreo jumped in on the hype with a special-made Oreos advertisement. The commercial was the Game of Thrones opening sequence recreated with Oreos in a stop-motion animation. To do this, CNET explains, they collaborated with Elastic, the studio behind the non-cookie made Game of Thrones opening.
Describing the thought process that went into using all of these Oreos, Kirk Shintani, Elastic's Head of 3D, said, "We wanted to make sure that we built a world of Oreos first and established this language of Oreo. And then we'd add our Game of Thrones influences into that. The thing that we wanted to avoid is just taking Oreos and creme and then stuffing them into our existing main title." In practice, this meant utilizing the two parts of an Oreo, the creme and the cookie, as well as using crumbs to signify the natural landscape and the other, human-made structures.
In the end, Stash reports, the team repurposed 2,750 cookies and an estimated 20 million crumbs to completely refashion an iconic television opening.
Theatricality is par for the course for Oreos
While hiring a team to physically recreate a television opening is the most all-out Oreo has been in their attempts to chase headlines, the theatricality is not out of character. In October of 2020, for example, Oreo claimed it had built a Svadbald-styled seed vault. They even filmed a miniature pseudo-documentary about the vault's creation.
On top of that, as Food & Wine reported at the time, Oreo even indulged in a special packaging for their cookies. "As an added precaution," the company announced, "the Oreo packs are wrapped in mylar, which can withstand temperatures from minus 80 degrees to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and is impervious to chemical reactions, moisture and air, keeping the cookies fresh and protected for years to come." All of this was done to capitalize on the fact that an asteroid would pass very close to Earth, even though it wouldn't have posed any actual threat to our planet.
On an artistic level, we think that the Oreo Vault fails to compete against the Oreo Game of Thrones opening. But it should be noted that the sacrifice of thousands of Oreos is something the company wouldn't bat an eye at if they sense a good headline.