A little brand rivalry can be entertaining on social media. But watching colorful candy characters seemingly tear apart a competitor’s billboard takes the joke to an entirely different level.
That is what Sour Patch Kids is doing with OREO in its first integrated UK advertising campaign, “Not As Sweet As They Look.” Created by VCCP, the campaign brings the candy brand’s mischievous personality into the physical world through outdoor installations in London and Bristol, alongside a wider series of posters across the UK and Republic of Ireland.
The idea builds on the playful exchanges between Sour Patch Kids and OREO on TikTok and Instagram, where brands can behave more like internet personalities than conventional advertisers.
For people familiar with those exchanges, the billboards extend an existing joke. For everyone else, the sight of candy characters causing trouble is entertaining enough to stand on its own.
Table of contents
Jump to each section:
How Sour Patch Kids brings its OREO rivalry to the streets
At four special-build outdoor locations, including three in London and one in Bristol, Sour Patch Kids characters appear to interfere with neighboring OREO billboards. The installations turn a familiar form of social-media banter into a physical joke. Instead of replying to OREO in a comment section, the candy characters seem to be causing trouble directly on the street.
The visual is deliberately simple. Brightly colored characters that look friendly are caught behaving badly, reinforcing the contrast between their appearance and the candy’s sour taste. The OREO connection adds another layer for audiences who recognize the brands’ playful exchanges online.
Someone familiar with the rivalry can appreciate the continuation of the joke, while someone encountering the billboard for the first time can still understand what is happening.
Beyond the OREO installations, the campaign includes other mischievous scenes. One execution shows a tug of war that splits a Sour Patch Kid apart, while another turns a tennis match into an unexpectedly aggressive encounter.
These scenes follow the same creative logic. The characters appear harmless, but their behavior suggests otherwise. The campaign gives Sour Patch Kids a recognizable personality that can be understood through actions rather than a lengthy advertising message.
At four special-build outdoor locations, including three in London and one in Bristol, Sour Patch Kids characters appear to interfere with a neighboring OREO poster. The stunt translates a rivalry already played out in TikTok and Instagram comments into something passersby can see without opening an app.
That transition matters because the creative does not need viewers to know every exchange between the two brands. The visual joke is immediately legible: the supposedly sweet-looking candy characters are behaving badly.
Other outdoor executions push the same contradiction. One depicts a tug of war that splits a Sour Patch Kid apart. Another turns a tennis match into a surprisingly aggressive scene. Each exaggerates the gap between the characters’ friendly appearance and the product’s sour taste.
Social-media rivalries have become a familiar part of how brands entertain audiences online. Instead of communicating only through product announcements, brands can develop recognizable personalities through jokes, comments and playful exchanges. For audiences, these interactions can make brands feel more like participants in internet culture.
Sour Patch Kids and OREO already have a history of playful exchanges on TikTok and Instagram. The outdoor campaign takes that relationship beyond the platforms where it originally developed. This matters because social-media humor does not always translate easily into traditional advertising.
A joke that depends on a particular meme, comment thread or trending sound can lose its meaning when removed from that context. Audiences encountering a billboard may have no knowledge of the original conversation.
Sour Patch Kids avoids that problem by making the physical scene understandable without requiring viewers to know the backstory. The apparent destruction of an OREO billboard communicates mischief immediately. Familiarity with the online rivalry makes the joke richer, but it is not necessary to understand it.
That gives the campaign two potential audiences: people who already follow the brands’ online personalities and passersby who discover the joke through outdoor advertising. It also demonstrates how an established brand personality can move between channels without simply reproducing the same content. The campaign is not a screenshot of a social-media post enlarged onto a billboard. It reimagines the joke using the physical characteristics of outdoor advertising itself.
How VCCP turns the sweet and sour personality into a campaign
The creative idea behind “Not As Sweet As They Look” comes from a straightforward product characteristic. Sour Patch Kids candies have colorful, approachable appearances but deliver a sour taste before becoming sweet. The campaign translates that contrast into the behavior of its characters. Rather than explaining the product through conventional messaging, VCCP gives the candy characters personalities that reflect the experience of eating it.
They look innocent but act unpredictably. The OREO billboard stunt is one expression of that personality, while the tug-of-war and tennis executions explore it through different scenarios.
Sarah Haworth, brand manager for Sour Patch Kids at Mondelez International, described the campaign as a way to introduce the brand to UK consumers with “a bit of attitude and mischief.”
That description captures why the creative works as more than a one-off joke. The mischievous behavior is connected to something recognizable about the product, allowing the brand to use the same personality across different advertising formats.
It also gives Sour Patch Kids a distinct creative direction in a crowded confectionery category, where brands compete for attention through flavor, packaging, novelty and promotional activity.
Instead of focusing exclusively on product imagery, the campaign turns the candy characters into the source of entertainment. VCCP says the campaign is running across the UK and Republic of Ireland during September and October 2026. No reach, sales lift or other commercial performance figures have been disclosed, so the campaign’s effectiveness cannot yet be measured through reported results.
Still, the creative demonstrates how product characteristics can provide the foundation for a recognizable brand personality, particularly when that personality is expressed consistently across channels.
What marketers can learn from the Sour Patch Kids campaign
Sour Patch Kids shows how a brand can turn an existing online personality into an outdoor experience without losing the humor that made the original interaction interesting.
The broader lesson is not that every brand needs to start a public rivalry. It is that familiar brand behavior can become a creative asset when audiences recognize it and the idea works beyond its original platform.
There are four lessons for marketers.
1. Build on a recognizable brand personality
Sour Patch Kids does not need to invent an entirely new character or campaign attitude for its billboards. The mischievous behavior fits the brand’s existing sweet-versus-sour identity and its playful interactions with OREO.
For marketers, this shows the value of developing a personality that can be expressed consistently across campaigns. When audiences already understand how a brand behaves, new creative executions can build on that familiarity.
2. Make social-media ideas work without their original context
A social-media joke may depend on captions, comments or an ongoing conversation. Outdoor advertising reaches people who may never have encountered any of those elements. Sour Patch Kids translates its rivalry into a physical scene that communicates the joke immediately.
Brands adapting online ideas for other channels should consider whether the creative still makes sense to someone seeing it for the first time.
3. Turn product characteristics into entertaining stories
The campaign’s mischievous characters are not disconnected from the candy itself. Their behavior reflects the contrast between Sour Patch Kids’ friendly appearance and its sour taste.
For marketers, this is a reminder that product characteristics can provide useful creative material. A recognizable product truth can help make entertaining advertising feel connected to the brand rather than interchangeable with a competitor’s campaign.
4. Use outdoor advertising as part of the entertainment
The special-build installations make the physical billboard part of the joke. Instead of placing a conventional advertisement beside an OREO poster, Sour Patch Kids creates the appearance of characters interfering with the neighboring display. That approach gives the outdoor format a creative role beyond displaying a message.
For brands exploring experiential or unconventional out-of-home advertising, the opportunity is to consider how the environment itself can contribute to the story. Ultimately, the Sour Patch Kids campaign illustrates how internet-inspired brand behavior can extend into the physical world. The OREO rivalry provides familiarity for audiences who know the brands online, while the mischievous characters make the campaign understandable to everyone else.
Its commercial impact remains unproven, but the creative offers a useful example of how brands can connect product personality, online culture and traditional advertising. For marketers, the most interesting part is not simply that Sour Patch Kids has taken a joke offline. It is that the joke still works when the social-media context disappears.
OREO brings the K-pop heat with BABYMONSTER in limited-edition collab
How OREO extends snack culture into entertainment and offline activations.
