Hasta La Creative!

To promote the return of General Mills’ beloved French Toast Crunch cereal — which returned this January after being discontinued in 2006 — McCann teamed up with Picture Mill, Beacon Street and director Matt Piedmont for a campaign entitled “The Tiny & The Tasty.”

A series of ads parodies daytime soap operas, which were at their peak during French Toast Crunch’s heyday in the mid to late 90s (the brand launched in 1995) with a “mini mini-soap opera.” The 30-second spots cast a family of dolls and take on such soap opera cliches as “Amnesia,” “Murder,” “Inheritance” and pregnancy. In “Amnesia,” a couple’s son suffers from amnesia and forgets, among other things, to wear pants. That’s a pretty good barometer for the rest of the campaign as well, which deals in over-the-top silliness. The goofiness gets so ridiculous that it detracts from the intended nostalgia factor, though we imagine that all most fans of the brand need to run clamoring to the grocery store is a reminder that it’s back.

Bill Wright, global executive creative director at McCann, told Adweek the idea emerged from “the 1990s origin of French Toast Crunch. That was the decade when daytime dramas were at their height of popularity. So when you take soap operas and cross them with tiny dolls, you get a strangely awesome mashup.”

Glaceau has a new product, fruitwater, that is most likely 0-calorie sparkling fruit-flavored water. I can’t tell from this spot, but that’s my guess. Sounds like just the thing a rich  woman would use to cut her vodka, doesn’t it? It’s great that there’s definitely a customer base for this new product.

To push fruitwater onto said rich women is one of their own, Christina Applegate, best known for playing Kelly Bundy on Married… with Children and jumping ship before her NBC show, Up All Night, was canceled. According to Wikipedia, her mom also used to have a thing with Stephen Stills, so that’s something.

In order to grow fruitwater’s 4,000 or so Twitter followers to a substantial enough number to convince some brand reps that their social media is “working,” consumers are being encouraged to confess crimes and say mean things via the #sparklingtruth hashtag for a campaign from L.A.-based agency Zambezi. If your truth is good enough, fruitwater will give you a personal assistant for a week. But, of course, the only way you could know that is if you start following the account or, like me, you were sent a press release describing the contest. You gotta work for information on the incentive, you know? Credits after the jump.

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