Oreo Separator Machines

Submission 17,533

Part of a series on Super Bowl XLVII. [View Related Entries]

About

Oreo Separator Machines are devices that are designed to split Oreo cookies into two pieces and remove the cream filling, many of which were produced by Wieden + Kennedy as part of the "Cookie vs. Creme" ad campaign for the snack food company Nabisco. Since the launch of the campaign during the Super Bowl XLVII in February 2013, the adverts have inspired numerous YouTube videos showcasing custom-designed prototypes of cookie separators.

Origin

On February 26th, 2013, The official Oreo YouTube channel uploaded the first commercial of the series featuring a Rube Goldberg-style Oreo cookie separator machine purportedly built by physicist David Neevel. Within the next three weeks, the video received over 4.03 million views and 4,000 comments.

The video was soon revealed to be part of the “Cookie vs. Creme”^[4] marketing campaign by Wieden + Kennedy,^[1] Portland-based advertising agency that is best known for producing several successful Old Spice advertisements.

Spread

The same day Neevel's separator machine was uploaded to YouTube, Redditor PenName submitted the video to the /r/videos subreddit,^[2] where it gained upwards of 13,000 up votes and 1,200 comments in the following 20 days. On February 27th, the advertising news blog Ad Week^[3] published an article about the video, reporting that Neevel was employed by Wieden + Kennedy.

On March 1st, Oreo uploaded a second video featuring a separator machine built by Minnesota toy scientists Bill Fienup and Barry Kudrowitz, which knocks off the top of an Oreo before heating and spraying the cream off (shown below, left). Within 18 days, the video garnered over 400,000 views and 100 comments. On March 11th, CNN aired a segment about the separator machines, featuring interviews with Fienup and Kudrowitz (shown below, right).

On March 17th, 2013, YouTuber JoergSprave uploaded a video titled "Oreo Separation Pump Gun," featuring a pump action crossbow using Oreo cookies as ammunition (shown below). The same day, the video was submitted to the /r/videos subreddit,^[5] receiving more than 2,900 up votes on Reddit and 250,000 views on YouTube in the next 48 hours.

Notable Examples

Oreo released two more separator machine videos during the month of March (shown below, top) and other YouTubers have since uploaded videos of other Oreo splitting machines (shown below, bottom).