Kellogg’s Turn the Clock Back to Celebrate Saturday Morning

It’s easy to see your childhood days through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, and that’s an impulse Kellogg’s make the most of in their latest brand ad, which taps into the memories of a very specific generation.

The ad is done as a mock home video from the year 1996, with all the shaky camerawork and grainy images we expect from the camcorder era. The footage is just kids eating cereal, playing, and watching Saturday Morning TV with its ads for Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops and more. They’re also having fun finding the toys in cereal boxes and playing the puzzles and games printed on the back. There’s no narrative, just a celebration of the fun of breakfast cereal and closing pack shot of three Kellogg’s brands with the slogan “The Taste Of Saturday Morning”.

The ad is nostalgic but in a way that’s both smart and focused. The Millennial kids in the ad are most likely parents now themselves, and while cereal marketing has changed a lot since the 90s, the ad is a reminder of all the fun and freedom that Saturday morning represents for kids. What’s clever about it is how it resists the temptation to editorialize or cut to the kids all grown up in the present. That would break the spell, and remind viewers that what they are watching is just an ad, not a memory. Instead the ad lets its audience fill in their own happy memories of Saturday Mornings growing up.

For a 15 second ad, Kellogg’s pack in a lot of memories and emotions – and a lot of brand assets too. There’s Tony The Tiger on the TV, packs galore, and the distinctive rainbow colors of Froot Loops. It’s a commercial that’s efficient as well as effective, making excellent use of its limited time.

So how do Kellogg’s perform with real audiences? After all, some of them won’t be the right age to remember a 90s childhood. The ad does extremely well. It scores a Strong 4.5-Star Rating for long-term brand growth potential, and an Exceptional Spike Rating predicting short-term sales gains. Both are well above the US average for cereals on the Test Your Ad platform.

It’s proof that even very specific cultural references and nostalgic emotions can have a broad appeal as long as they’re tapping into something universal too. In this case, the feeling of Saturday morning as a special time, and breakfast as a moment of family fun, resonate across generations. Kellogg’s have made an ad that uses specific nostalgia to speak to childhood happiness in general, and done it in a way that reinforces their branding as well as their heritage.