Creative Harmony: How an Oreo Campaign Proved a Perfect Recipe for Music and Creativity

It’s ironic that the most wonderful time of the year can also be the most stressful. That’s certainly true when it comes to food - holiday dinners end up in smoke, ambitious baking projects are strewn across the kitchen floor, and the sounds of carol-singers are accompanied by fire alarms as our neighbours endure the same fate. During last year’s festive season, the iconic sandwich cookie brand Oreo touched on a universal truth: That sometimes, despite our noble intentions, the best laid holiday plans can go awry. In those all-too familiar instances, the brand suggests, it’s safer to opt for the tried-and-true comfort of an Oreo cookie. 

The brand’s tongue-in-cheek holiday ad, from creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi Canada, was accompanied by a pitch-perfect festive soundtrack which tied the entire concept together. Playful lyrics sung in an idyllic festive tone (“Gingerbread man with the missing arm / smoke everywhere, there’s the fire alarm”, for example) laid the perfect foundation for the light-hearted visual comedy playing out on-screen. But as well as being a prime example of a friendly, joyful holiday ad, the campaign represented something else, too: A perfect case study of music working in harmony with a creative idea. 

So often, we hear that music is the final item on the creative agenda. But here, Saatchi & Saatchi were sure to prioritise audio from the start - with the result being a seamless collaboration with TA2 Sound + Music. To find out more about how it all came together, LBB caught up with creative directors Craig Brandon and Mike De Candido, alongside audio director Steve Gadsden. 

“For me, it was an ideal process”, says Steve. “We’re always trying to explain the benefits of bringing audio into the process as soon as possible, and this ad does a great job of showing that. For spots like this, music really needs to lead the production. This is because many things can happen along the way, and working in collaboration with your audio partner means that the audio can grow or adapt organically and really fit the idea like a glove”.

As Craig and Mike recall, the decision to open up a dialogue with Steve and TA2 at an early stage was something of a no-brainer. “In this case, the music went on to inform a lot of the visuals”, says Mike. 

In addition to helping on a conceptual level, that level of collaboration also afforded the team some practical advantages, too. “There are a lot of moments in this commercial which are very see-say”, explains Craig. “The gingerbread men with broken arms is one example of that. That also really helped us and the director focus on what needed to be shot and what ultimately wouldn’t work because it didn’t have a connection to the song”. 

Looking back, the concept behind the song itself was pivotal even in the briefing stage for the project. “We’d asked the client for an opportunity to simply do some original thinking, and they obliged”, says Mike. “We came into the room with a ton of random scripts, but it wasn’t until we started talking about the idea of a festive song that the heads in the room really started nodding”. 

“I think that’s either the third or fourth time I’ve ended up attempting to sing for a client in a pitch”, recalls Craig with a smile. “I usually need beer and a karaoke screen, but somehow I made it work. So we already had the kernel of an idea, and we immediately knew that Steve could elevate it and make it perfect for the ad”. 

Another factor in the success of this particular collaboration is that it’s the most recent of many occasions where the trio have worked together. As Mike puts it, “the longer you work with someone, the easier you find it to establish a short form language for communicating, and build up that all-important trust factor”. 

But whilst that might be especially true of this Oreo ad, there’s a deeper significance about the interplay between music and creative ideas which shouldn’t be ignored. “Often, music is reactive to what’s happening visually. Because of that, I think there are a lot of people who think they can afford to leave it until the last minute”, says Steve. “But the truth is that music, visuals, and concepts all inform each other. They should grow together. The more that happens, the more we can talk about what the music should be doing and the emotions we want to try and capture”. 

And that, ultimately, is the true benefit of putting music side-by-side with ideas in the creative process. It’s an end-product where nothing feels shoehorned and, to borrow some imagery from the ad itself, there’s no risk of a faulty recipe, or ideas getting burned in the oven. Get that right, and any ad can be as reliably satisfying as an Oreo.