The cereal industry can’t shake its addiction to googly-eyed mascots
Cereal makers have exploited the magnetic lure of cartoons from the get-go
American breakfast cereal barons at the turn of the last century learned one thing early on: There are only so many things you can do with boxed corn, rice or wheat.
So, to distinguish their otherwise unremarkable grains in the marketplace, they turned to advertising — to bright, beaming, cartoonish characters that snap-crackle-and-popped off the shelves and into the hands of suggestible consumers.
Mascots — along with truckloads of sugar — they discovered, sold products, especially to kids. And now, a century-plus later, the food industry is still leaning on googly-eyed, big-headed, multi-colored characters to sell unhealthy food to children, even though it has made promising noises it will stop.
Relying on mascots and characters, in fact, is so embedded in the DNA of the American cereal industry — and food marketing to kids more broadly — it’s hard to see how they can ever be separated. Still, health advocates, including first lady Michelle Obama, have tried mightily to urge the industry to direct the power of mascots toward healthier food.
This week, a group called Healthy Eating Research, a project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, released the findings of two studies: one looked at the influence of mascots (Tony the Tiger) or licensed media characters (Shrek, Nemo) on the way kids eat; the other is about the industry’s efforts to curb its mascot addiction.
The first study found that licensed media characters in particular have a powerful influence over kids — both positive and negative. Nemo, for example, can entice a child to eat an apple. But Nemo is also more likely to make a kid want something unhealthy, like a candy bar. The second study found that food companies, despite pledging to do otherwise, are still exploiting the magnetic lure of animated characters to sell unhealthy food to vulnerable kids.
“The pledges they have made have loopholes and are virtually token efforts,” explained Vivica Kraak, a professor of nutrition and food policy at Virginia Tech, who co-authored the Healthy Eating Research papers. “They are not meant to protect children.”
The industry just can’t help itself.
In the early cereal heyday hundreds of manufacturers rushed into the booming market, and one company introduced a brand called Force in 1901, emblazoning the box with a mascot called Sunny Jim.
The mascot became so popular that companies helmed by the likes of C.W. Post and W.K. Kellogg scrambled to the market with their own mascots. Many became advertising icons. Snap, Crackle and Pop debuted in the 1930s, followed over the next decades by Tony the Tiger, Sugar Bear, Toucan Sam, the Trix Rabbit, Lucky the Leprechaun, and on and on. (Fun fact: Post paid Walt Disney $1.5 million to draw cartoon characters in the 1930s. Disney took the money and launched his animation empire — which, many decades later, forged a marketing alliance with Kellogg.)
Cereal makers weren’t (and aren’t) the only ones to use animated characters. They just needed them more, and they had a particularly good canvas at their disposal: a flat, broad box, designed to be non-crushable, that also happened to provide a handy surface on which to project a cast of semi-psychedelic sugar-bomb hawkers.
And then, like tiny marshmallows from heaven, came color television — an even more potent medium for reaching into the tender psyches of young consumers. Advertising pioneer Leo Burnett first figured this out, and soon wrapped entire cartoon episodes around animated shills — Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone, et al. — who would turn toward the viewer, mid-show, and push their flakes and pebbles.
“It was seamless,” Kraak said. “It was hard to know to what was the ad and what was the program.”
The strategy went a marbit too far. Consumer advocates began complaining, eventually pushing Congress to pass the Children’s Television Act in 1990, which limited the amount of advertising that could be directed at kids.
Still, as obesity rates continued climbing and evidence piled up that children were getting fat in front of the television, consumer advocates kept pushing food companies to rein in their mascots, while at the same time pressing communications companies like Viacom (which owns Nickelodeon) to limit the licensing of their characters to food makers.
In 2006, the Council of Better Business Bureaus and 10 big food companies launched the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, in which they pledged to limit child-focused, character-heavy ads to “better for you” foods. But they couldn’t quite agree on a definition for “better for you,” so four government agencies banded together in the Interagency Working Group to come up with nutrition standards.
The industry vehemently opposed them, and instead came up with its own nutrition standards, applying them only selectively, according to Kraak’s studies. For starters, most of the companies that pledged to only advertise “better for you” foods included a caveat in the fine print.
“It says: ‘Does not apply to brand equity mascots,’” Kraak said. “That’s wrong.”
The industry has claimed some legitimate improvements. For example, in 2013 the Department of Agriculture said that the sugar content of General Mills and Kellogg cereals — which represent about 60% of the market — dropped 10%. The industry celebrated, saying it was making steady progress.
But, Kraak, for one, noted that the sugar content in the cereals is still so high that those cereals aren’t allowed in government-funded food aid packages given to women and children.
“Industry’s self-policing [efforts] are not going to get us there in the accelerated timeframe we need,” Kraak said. “We’re in the middle of an obesity crisis. We can’t wait 25 years.”
But the power of the mascot endures. Of the 10 top-selling cereal brands in the US last year, six had mascots on the box and five of those were clearly aimed at kids. Those that didn’t boast a smiling cartoon face? Well, silly rabbit, they’re for grown-ups.
