We wanted to make mini films. We didn’t want to make cereal commercials," says Stephanie Crippen, creative director/copywriter at Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, referring to a new Special K Red Berries campaign for Kellogg’s, directed by Tom Carty of Gorgeous Enterprises, London, and bicoastal Anonymous Content.
Indeed, spots such as "Bus Stop," "Office," and "City Block" break the mold of this traditional packaged goods category. There are no images of milk splashing on flakes or idealized breakfast rituals or impossibly skinny women discussing a healthy diet. Instead, the ads attempt to capture the way women really think about weight and diet issues. The spots employ the kind of candid language that appears in Sex and the City or Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the women’s thoughts jump around in a realistically disjunctive manner.
For instance, in "Bus Stop" a woman waits for a bus as we hear a voiceover of her rambling thoughts. She thinks about how if clothing companies could label size 12 items as size 6, they would sell more items, then veers off, lamenting that if she had gone to the bakery instead of the donut shop, she wouldn’t have missed her bus. Suddenly, she’s checking out a passing bicyclist’s fit body, and her thoughts turn to exercise and her misplaced treadmill. Addressing both the woman and the viewer, the tag follows: "Don’t be so hard on yourself. Help yourself."
"People in general are hard on themselves all the time," relates Crippen. "Women are particularly hard on themselves. The way women talk in their head about their thighs or their hips—we wanted it to be as close to that as we could possibly push Kellogg’s to go."
"Office" transposes the "Bus Stop" scenario to the workplace. We hear an office worker’s bubbling stream of consciousness as she heads to a meeting with her boss. The woman’s expression is composed, but her mind is darting everywhere. Walking down the hall, she imitates her boss reprimanding her for eating chocolates intended for clients. Things momentarily brighten up when she spies Barry, a cute co-worker, and imagines telling him that "curves are in," referring to her own figure. But she decides she’s probably not his type, and quickly launches into a catty description of the photos of swimsuit models on his desk.
"City Block" follows the thoughts of a variety of women who dwell on physical appearance, food and guys. It’s as if the camera itself is free-associating as it follows one woman, then shifts to another. For instance, a woman awaiting a blind date sits in a diner booth, thinking, "Ooh, I hate booths like these. When you get up, it’s all sunken in where your butt’s been. … I can’t believe I was going to go on this date. He’s got a lot of nerve keeping me waiting." The camera then glides over to show another woman who is singing to herself about the contents of the salad she’s eating. The spot then shifts outside, to a woman complaining to herself about losing another pair of sunglasses—she realizes later on that the glasses are on top of her head—while another woman flips through a fashion magazine, psyching herself up for a job interview.
Reed Collins, creative director/ art director on the package, points out that the spots are meant to appeal to people who are not necessarily following a strict diet or exercise regimen; they’re aimed at consumers who aren’t afraid to eat a sweet cereal, albeit one that contains only a 110 calories per serving. "I think the people who eat [regular] Special K and other diet brands live and die by what they eat," he says. "This campaign is for people who are not so strict about everything."
"The spots really do capture the flow of people’s thinking patterns, right down to the triggers that make a person start thinking about their body or food, and those triggers were really important," says Crippen. "There was always a trigger [in the ads]—like with the woman sitting in the booth, women really think that their butt caves [into the booth cushion]."
new direction
According to the creatives, Kellogg’s was immediately pleased with the unusual concepts. "They loved it immediately," reports Collins. "We had done testing, and we knew what we were trying to say."
"One thing I think was important to helping us sell this campaign is that we didn’t put all this on paper when we took it to the client," says Crippen. "Reed and I actually grabbed a video camera and a guy from downstairs in the video department, and we went out and shot six or seven women on the street. Then we went downstairs and put voice on it.
"I think if we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have been able to convey it in the way we wanted to," she continues. "We didn’t just shoot it and show it to them. We put the ending on it: ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’ [They were] almost like mini spots."
Collins had never worked with Tom Carty, who prior to becoming a director had been a creative at AMV BBDO, London. "I knew [Tom Carty] very well from London, and Mark Tutssel, our creative director, has had a good relationship with him, too," explains Collins. "He’s got some amazing stuff on his reel. We thought he could bring a subtle sensibility [to the project]."
Collins says that Carty made the spots more believable by not having the copy come off as a series of one-liners. "It came across as more authentic in the way people think in their heads—it’s random thoughts mixed up with weight issues," he says. "It wasn’t just about weight issues because women don’t just think about their weight, 24/7."
Shooting the spots, which were filmed in Los Angeles, was a great education, says Crippen. "This three-day shoot, from beginning to end, was such a learning experience for everybody," she notes. "You could tell Tom was learning from Vilmos [Zsigmond, the Academy Award-winning DP who lensed the ads], who was fantastic in the way he set up shots. Reed and I were learning from Tom, and our producer was learning from working with Gorgeous, which is a great production company."
A new round of Special K Red Berries commercials is in the works, and Crippen says the effort won’t be a simple redo of the current batch. "We’re trying to evolve it so it’s not going to be just women [in the spots]," says Crippen. "And we’re trying to evolve it so it doesn’t look the same."
