Surreal | (No tagline)

When you strip it down, advertising is pretty dumb. It’s a sales message that interrupts your otherwise normal day. There you are eating a ham sandwich and all of a sudden some aging actor with an iconic butt chin shows up in the magazine you’re flipping through, trying to sell you a Swiss watch that costs the price of a used Honda Civic. Hey, I get it. Who reads magazines? Let’s pretend we’re in a doctor’s office with a low cell phone battery then, ok?

I’m getting off track. Distracted by advertising, you might say.

One way for ads to not come off like…well…ads, is to play into the stupidity of it all. Oatly made this approach quite famous of late (even if the anonymous Internet message boards of the industry love to tear their work apart). However, there’s more than one way to make that proverbial ham sandwich that won’t have you over-indexing on your daily step count.

These ads for a UK based cereal brand, with ingredients derived from plant proteins, lean heavily into the dumb. But, they’re fun. They’re quick. They’re easy to get. And, they genuinely brought a smile to this old grouch’s face. Sure, they don’t say much about the product itself, but they’re a silly way to introduce something that is actually quite interesting. And it’d very uninteresting if we were bludgeoned over the head with how innovative the product itself is.

So take these as inspiration, go on and write something so stupid that you might just get fired for it. (You probably won’t).