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GREAT
MOMENTS IN KIDDIE MARKETING
Cereal Television
Bullwinkle
plugs Trix in 1960. The "silly rabbit" made its debut as a hand
puppet on Rocky and His Friends.
As is the case today, pioneers of new media back in the day were those with
things (whether objects or ideas) to sell. By 1923, 536 radio stations had
crammed their way onto the airwaves as banks, poultry farms, police departments,
churches, and others rushed to get their piece of the then-unregulated spectrum.
Among them was the Washburn Crosby Company (which changed its name four
years later to General Mills), which teamed with the city of Minneapolis
and a group of budding entrepreneurs to buy a local radio station and name
it after themselves, WCCO.
The milling company launched another experiment that year: the production
and marketing of a ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, Wheaties. Among their
innovations was the first-ever program-length singing commercial. The
Wheaties Quartet, a tossed-together vocal jazz group, performed jingles
and other musical selections during its half-hour show on WCCO. The show
lasted six years, until General Mills decided it wasn't working, took
the show to a national network, and redirected their ad message to an
untapped market: kids.
To carry out the new campaign, General Mills hired ad wiz Frank Hummart,
the genius responsible for inventing soap operas, creating continuing
daytime radio dramas, purchasing airtime from the radio network, and convincing
soap companies to pay for it all. Hummart went to work immediately by
adopting a popular cartoon character, Skippy, to be Wheatie's mascot.
The Skippy radio program was born in 1931 and featured the hero's exciting
adventures along with intermittent plugs for Wheaties. The show was a
huge success, spawning the Skippy Secret Service Society, contests, several
premiums, and other paraphernalia, as well as a genre of similar shows
by competing cereal manufacturers.
Skippy eventually met with an unfortunate promotional disaster (an episode
in which one of his friends was kidnapped coincided with the real-life
abduction of the Lindbergh baby) and was canceled in 1933. So Hummart
invented a new hero: Jack Armstrong, the "All-American Boy," an airplane-flying,
horseback-riding, spy-catching, football- and baseball-playing wonder.
Jack, like Skippy, was a hit with the kids. But also like Skippy, he
had his share of promotional woes. One storyline brought up the plight
of Jack's dying mother, who needed an expensive operation to survive.
Apparently the only way Jack could get the money and save her life was
by recovering a rare $20,000 stamp.
While the struggle played itself out on the radio, our hero urged listeners
to send in a nickel and a Wheaties box top to receive their own Jack Armstrong
stamp. The Federal Trade Commission intervened, however, on the grounds
that the promotion misled kids.
In another unhappy incident, two Minneapolis kids who were tuned into
the Jack Armstrong program heard a gunshot outside their home and, upon
opening the window, found their dead dad lying in a pool of blood. Since
the kids remembered what was happening during the program at the time
they heard the shot, the police requested a copy of the Jack Armstrong
script to determine the exact time of death. Following the trial, General
Mills made the best of an ugly situation. According to company officials,
they gave the grieving kids "a thrill" by presenting them with a copy
of the Jack Armstrong script autographed by the stars of the show.
So successful were these promotions that Wheaties remained a top seller
for years on end. This despite the fact that, according to General Mill's
own account, the success of the cereal had nothing to do with the taste
or health value of the flakes themseves. In blind taste tests, Wheaties
salesmen time and again couldn't differentiate the flakes from other brands.
As a former General Mills ad man puts it in Scott Bruce's and Bill Crawford's
Cerealizing America, "The product is no different from anybody else's.
It's just a product of unique and consistent advertising."
When it came to TV, the Wheaties promo team got off to a relatively
slow start. By then Post was selling piles of the rocklike morsels known
as Grape-Nuts via arrangements with The Danny Thomas Show and The Andy
Griffith Show (the cast of which sang the Post cereal theme song so that
the show's familiar opening whistle would flow seamlessly into the Post
jingle). And Kellogg's--partnered with Winston cigarettes--had a huge
hit with The Beverely Hillbillies.
Wheaties had become old-fashioned. Half-hearted appeals to kids--advertising
on Chompy the Lion, Ding Dong School Lone Ranger, Mickey Mouse Club--weren't
getting through, nor were sports-star endorsements. The answer to all
their problems was the Reverend Bob Richards--a minister/Olympic track
star gone full-time motivational speaker.
In 1958 Richards started working for Wheaties. Reborn as a breakfast
cereal zealot, he helped launched a fitness/health craze throughout the
U.S. The star of Life's Higher Goals and other motivational films, Richards
crossed the country delivering motivational talks, wrote dozens of self-help
books, and used cereal boxes to promote push-ups and jogging, all for
"the cause, the cause, the cause!"
Decades later, Richards found an even greater cause when he ran for
president in 1984 backed by the Populist Party--the right-wing sect that
went on to support former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke. Richards garnered
62,000 votes, losing the election to another former Wheaties pitchman,
Ronald Reagan. --CM
Source: Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast
Cereal, by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford.
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