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For Oreo Campaign Finale, a Twist on Collaboration

Oreo’s Daily Twist campaign has included ads that highlighted the Mars rover, gay pride and Talk Like a Pirate Day. The last day will have an ad created in real time.

IF, as the saying goes, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, what, if anything, does an ad a day do?

Kraft Foods, which makes Oreo cookies, and a team of agencies has been finding out since late June when they began collaborating on a campaign for the brand called Daily Twist — a riff on the “twist, lick and dunk” ritual followed by many Oreo fans. The campaign is offering a whimsical, humorous or eye-catching ad each day to the more than 27.9 million people who “like” Oreo on Facebook; the daily ad can also be seen on oreo.com, Pinterest and Twitter.

The subjects of the Daily Twist ads have so far included gay pride, Elvis Presley Week, Bastille Day, the Mars rover, Talk Like a Pirate Day, the introduction of the Apple iPhone 5 and the Emmy Awards.

The campaign is to last 100 days in a nod to an elaborate celebration by Kraft Foods of the 100th anniversary of Oreo, which started in March. As the 100th day nears, Kraft Foods and the agencies are making plans to produce the final ad next Tuesday in attention-getting fashion: live, in Times Square and based on ideas submitted by consumers in person and through social media.

Plans call for a temporary ad agency to be opened at 8 a.m. at Broadway and 46th Street, near the American Eagle Outfitters sign that will serve as an oversize Oreo billboard for the event. Representatives of the Oreo brand will be on site until 4 p.m., along with people from the New York office of DraftFCB, the Oreo creative agency, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies; 360i, the Oreo digital agency, part of Dentsu; and Weber Shandwick, the Oreo public relations agency, also part of Interpublic.

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The campaign is indicative of efforts by marketers and agencies to acknowledge the sped-up internal clocks of consumers as new technologies have resulted in increased expectations of content delivered instantly.

The Daily Twist campaign for Oreo is not the only one to embrace frequent updates. An initiative named The Four 2012 — a social media campaign to encourage voters to support marriage equality in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington State — presents on its Web site content that changes daily.

And in 1991, Chevys Fresh Mex restaurants ran a campaign called “Made fresh today” that was created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. The campaign featured commercials that were videotaped the day they were shown on television. To prove their “freshness,” the front pages of daily newspapers were included in the spots.

“Creating content in real time is not easy to do,” said Cindy Chen, marketing director for Oreo at Kraft Foods. “But we’re happy to see that the content we’re creating has been found very relevant.”

Ms. Chen bases that assessment on data like fans’ interaction with the content that the brand posts on its Facebook page. From the initial Daily Twist on June 25, through the ad that ran on Aug. 20, “ ‘likes,’ comments and ‘shares’ ” have increased an average of 110 percent, she said, rising to more than 14,500 from about 7,000.

The Daily Twist effort is meant to complement a print ad campaign for the 100th anniversary, Ms. Chen said, which give the Oreo perspective on moments from the last 100 years like the introduction of the yo-yo, the arrival of 3-D films and the invention of Pac-Man.

The daily ads are “to show the world how relevant this brand is now,” she added, by commenting on “real-time happenings.”

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There will be various steps in the process of the live creation of the Daily Twist finale next week. As the Oreo and agency representatives outline it, consumers will be able to submit ideas from 8 to 10 a.m. From 10 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., the representatives on site will narrow the field to eight submissions and sketch proposed ads based on those ideas. At 12:15, three finalists will be posted on the American Eagle Outfitters sign and Facebook for the public to vote on, using Facebook and Twitter. The voting will be closed around 1:45 and a winner announced by about 2. The event will continue with giveaways, sampling and other activities until 4.

“Advertising tends to be a business that starts a little later” than 8 a.m., “but not this time,” Jill Applebaum, senior vice president and group creative director at DraftFCB New York, said, laughing. Ms. Applebaum will be among the representatives working on site, she said, along with “a photographer, a retoucher” and, most likely “waiting in the wings,” lawyers to vet the consumers’ ideas.

During the weeks of creating the daily ads, “it changed the way you read the morning news,” Ms. Applebaum said, because “you’re reading it through that Oreo filter.”

“It’s been the best feeling in the business,” she added, “to see your work make people do something — share it, talk about it.”

Sarah Hofstetter, president at 360i, said it had been fun to produce relevant daily ads “while the world is watching,” adding, “The live event is going to be upping the ante to a degree.”

“When we started talking about the process, we likened it to a newsroom,” Ms. Hofstetter said, particularly “the daily meeting to discuss what goes on Page One.”

“For us, there’s only one page,” she added, referring to Oreo’s Facebook fan page.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: For Oreo Campaign Finale, A Twist on Collaboration. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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