Oreo's viral blowtorch videos backfired. The brand thought the stunt proved their cookies were tough. Instead, it made people question why they'd want to eat something that survives a blowtorch. The episode also covers how Coca-Cola expanded beyond soft drinks into juice, water, and sports drinks.
Did you see how going viral can hurt you?
No.
The Oreo experiment. So Oreo recently has been going viral all over the social web. So on the social web, people have been taking Oreos and they've been taking a blowtorch, all right?
Oh yeah!
And then cooking an Oreo, 'cause there's a lot of food chemicals or whatever they wanna call it that Oreo uses to make their cookies.
So they do it on like 1 second, 5 seconds, and then one's like 3 minutes.
So they take a cookie, quite a few cookies, they line 'em up, They'll do 1 second, then 2 seconds, then like 5 seconds, then 10 seconds, then 20 seconds, then 30 seconds. And they're putting it behind cardboard because you're using a blowtorch. You can't just put it on like a piece of paper. It's going to easily catch on fire. And what they're finding with 1 second, like the Oreo looks the same. You go all the way to 30 seconds, the Oreo roughly looks the same. It hasn't burned much at all. It didn't really burn quite really at all.
Yeah.
And it's the back, which is wood. is burning up, but the Oreo still looks edible. How bad do you think that is for their marketing? People are like, what the heck? This thing won't even flame up?
Yeah.
Should I even be putting it in my body? That's virality really hurting Oreo. And I think this will hurt their sales.
It went for a minute on the last one. It turned red, the Oreo.
I did not see the minute. I've seen up to 30 seconds.
Oh, you got tired of watching it. How many views did that get? Because I watched that video. This is weeks ago when I watched this.
Oh, there's tons of them.
That's what I'm saying, it's going viral.
Oh, so it's reposted? No, no, not just reposted.
Oh, many people are posting.
People are creating their own Oreo experiments and doing this. They think it's funny.
So, this is like billions of views?
Probably. My guess is billions at this point.
Wow, okay.
And it's in multiple languages too because I'm talking to my team in Portuguese like, yeah, you don't see it? It's so cool. I'm going to do it with my kids. And I'm like, uh-huh.
All right. Would you share this on Seed Oil Scout? Yeah, Seed Oil Scout, that's a legit app that tells you what has seed oil and what doesn't. A lot of people follow that.
But it's kind of crazy to think about Oreos not burning. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to eat an Oreo ever again.
When's the last time you ate an Oreo?
I can't even remember.
Yeah, exactly.
But I probably have had in the last 12 months cookies and cream ice cream.
Wow. And the thing is, they can't really sue anybody for this.
No, it's reality.
Yeah.
Put clean ingredients in your product, make it taste good, and it will then burn. I think that's true, right?
Yep. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. Well, hey, hey, hey, I got another Coca-Cola one for you because we're talking about food right now. Do you want to know how Coca-Cola went from a $4 billion company to $150 billion company with one question?
They just gave it many, many years and they didn't even need a question. They've just been in business such a long time, you continually generate more revenue.
No. What percentage of the entire liquid market do we have? So before, in the 1980s, Coca-Cola was doing pretty well. They had 45% market share of total soft drinks market. But the CEO, he asked 2 questions ahead of that. But the main question is, what percentage of the entire liquid market do we have? When the answer to the question was only a paltry 2%, they realized they can't just target the soft drink market. They have to go way larger than that. And so that's when Coca-Cola grew from $4 billion in 1981 to roughly $150 billion in 1997.
So they had 45, uh, 45% of like the Coke or carbonated drink market. Yeah. And then they decided to go out of soft drinks and they just went after the beverage market and they only own 2%. Yep. And I don't know what they own today percentage-wise, but it can't be 45% or anything like that of the total beverage market. It's too large. No, but I bet you they're in the— call it single digits or low double digits. Yeah, I guess. But we saw a massive market.
We saw in the '90s, I mean, they expanded into like, you know, sports drinks. They expanded to like Aquafina or Dasani, right?
Yeah.
And then I think now they own like a couple of like—
There's like the Gatorades, the Propel. I don't know which ones.
I don't think they have Powerade or whatever.
Vitaminwater.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right? Healthy versions, and there's energy drinks, and the list just goes on and on and on.
Yeah, I mean, one, they either invented things or they went on an acquisition spree. But I think this just flipped everything for them. It's like, okay, we're not just gonna go soft drink, we're gonna go everything. Yeah. So, so anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to join. 50+ other agency owners to grow your agency faster.
