Mario Oreos Top The High Score Table

Take the brand who made the best cookie ad we’ve ever tested and the brand who made the best videogame ad we’ve ever tested. Mix them together in an ad full of distinctive brand assets and joyful nostalgic cues. What do you get? The highest Test Your Ad score of the year so far. Oreo and Nintendo’s Super Mario collaboration – made with Dentsu Creative – is a 60-second delight that smashes it on all three of our main metrics, including a perfect 5.9-Star Rating.

It’s true that some product categories are more emotional than others. Candy, cookies, anything pet-related – these sectors have higher average Test Your Ad scores because the product itself makes people happy, even before the creative starts working its magic. But that’s not an automatic advantage, it just creates a higher bar for work that really stands out and entertains. And that’s what we have here.

The concept is beautifully simple. A Super Mario level with Oreos as Mario and glasses of milk as pipes, with the classic Mario theme played by clinking glass and the plops of cookies in milk. It’s so elegant and visually delightful that even though nothing else really happens in its 60 second runtime, viewers’ happiness and attention is easily sustained.

Ultimately the ad is a testament to the power of brand assets. The shape and design of Oreo cookies, their association with milk, the Mario level design and theme tune… all of these are gold standard brand associations, built over decades so that when an ad like this cleverly triggers several at once there’s a massive payoff in audience happiness.

Brand assets are always worth investing in. What about collaborations? Team ups between brands are great for creating buzz and earned media, and can create plenty of short term sales interest particularly when there’s limited edition products on offer too. In the case of the Mario Oreos, that’s exactly what’s happening: a staggeringly high 1.86 Spike Rating that tells us the ad will have no problem driving sales for the 16 different Mario cookie variants Mondelez are releasing.

Where branded collaborations often fall short are long-term impact and Brand Fluency. Multiple brands can make an ad more confusing from a fluency perspective. And the hype around the team up often seems to drive out more emotional elements of advertising like strong storytelling and characterization.

But Oreo’s ad shows how effective a collaboration can be. The strength of the brand assets and the delightfully playful use of them mean the commercial works on a level well beyond simple buzz. It’s a populist triumph that’s ended up toppling a previous Oreo ad from its spot on top of the cookie charts. The best cookie ad we’ve tested and the best ad of 2023 so far: we’d say that’s a high score.