Big Little ThingsShoulda hired us
Here’s the thing:
Post cereal wants me to know that Grape Nuts is an authentic brand. But what they’ve done instead is make me angry. Why? Because the ads themselves are bullshit. Because in the quest to be authentic, they’ve gone and revealed themselves as stunningly inauthentic. If the underlying theme of this campaign is, “It is what it is,” you’d expect Post to stop and think about their product, which has no grapes, and no nuts, and is very obviously not the thing it says it is. Sure, you could argue that they’re being self-referential, and that that makes it okay. And you can bet that’s the angle they’re ad agency took to sell this concept to ‘em: “People want transparency, see? And if we do it tongue-in-cheek like so that people know we’re being playful and holding the mirror up to ourselves as well as our culture, they’ll buy in.”
Nonsense.
Because you can’t get cred by simply admitting you’re a faker. You actually have to stop faking it.
