Hasta La Creative!

Kellogg is handing over U.S. creative duties for its Special K brand from Leo Burnett to JWT, AdAge reports. Pointing to an internal memo obtained by the publication, it reports that Leo Burnett will retain creative duties in Europe and Canada. JWT, meanwhile, will handle creative duties in Latin America. Leo Burnett has served as Kellogg’s lead agency for around 65 years, and will continue in that role, including working on breakfast brands like toaster pastry staple brand Pop-Tarts and cereal brand Frosted Flakes.

The loss is a sizable one for the agency, as Kellogg spent $120 million on measured media for the brand last year, according to Kantar Media. Leo Burnett’s most recent effort for the brand, “Eat Special. Feel Special.,” showed a change of approach from body positivity and presenting the cereal as diet-friendly to highlighting its nutritional benefits. But it would seem that Kellogg decided the change in direction merited a change in agency. Like many cereal brands, Special K has been struggling, with Euromonitor International reporting a 14.5% drop in sales from 2013 to 2014.

“We are incredibly proud of the contributions this agency has made to the success of Special K,” Rich Stoddart, CEO at Leo Burnett North America, stated in the internal memo obtained by AdAge. “In a little over a decade, we helped build the business from $412 million to almost $3 billion. I’m proud of the smart and strategic work the team developed to help the brand address its current business challenges. We put great work on the table, but in the end, Kellogg bought an idea from JWT that tested better.”

Special K believes positivity is key to weight management success. So, it's taking aim at its opposite—"fat talk," or the negative things some women say about their bodies and others. The Kellogg's brand says 93 percent of women fat talk, "and it's weighing women down." Now, ahead of the New Year slim-down season, Special K and Leo Burnett have launched a whole "Fight Fat Talk" campaign, with social, video and other efforts aimed at getting women to talk more positively about themselves.

The two-minute spot below, directed by O Positive's Peyton Wilson, has a pretty aggressive strategy for dealing with fat talk: It ambushes women with it while they're shopping for clothes (a prime occasion for fat talk). Actual fat talk, taken from Twitter and elsewhere, is printed on signs and labels in the store—and is meant to make women realize how terribly self-defeating it is.

The spot is clearly going for an empowering vibe, à la Dove or Pantene. And the women do get emotional upon seeing the signs, realizing they're being too hard on themselves. But in some ways, it doesn't feel as natural. Without any positivity at all, the signs just don't seem very inspiring—unlike the Dove and Pantene ads, which had the stranger-described sketches and the "Don't let labels hold you back" elements as springboards for positivity. Plus, there's also the inconvenient fact that Special K is expressly meant to make you thinner—rather than making you more accepting of yourself.

What do you think of the video? Does it work for you?