Bronze
Production & Post-Production
Stop-Frame Animation Campaign

“AI slop” is cluttering up people’s feeds – and the people (especially our chronically online teen target) are getting fed up with it.

When we set out to make Cinnamon Toast more relevant to an older teen audience, we knew we had to take a visual approach that didn’t just stop their scrolls, but would stand out from the low-effort disposable content that had taken their FYP hostage.

Teens aren’t asking their parents to include Cinnamon Toast Crunch on the grocery list. Several years ago, the brand introduced 2D animated characters to align to trends popular with tweens, resulting in declines in taste perception and overall relevance to the older teens it now wants to win over.

To get them to crave Cinnamon Toast Crunch, we had to remind them about what makes it so irresistible – the cinnadust covering every square – and do so in a way that speaks to their more mature sensibilities.

In recent years, teenage tastes have shifted toward the dark and surreal – 47% of our target audience has engaged with horror/true crime content in the past 30 days (Hispanic teens, 15-17 from 2024 MRI Simmons Teen Lifestyle survey).

And it just so happens that our cinnadust-covered cereal has been eating itself for over a decade.

To modernize this iconic narrative and double-down on taste appeal, we took the classic “cereal-eating-cereal” concept and made it darker.

We created gritty style worlds that exist within a seemingly innocent kitchen setting. Spaghetti boxes turn into buildings, a spatula becomes a street light, an entire apartment exists within a cereal box.

Our meticulously cinnadust-covered villains and victims lurk through these worlds, stepping in and out of pools of light shot with noir-style angles, capturing the glistening cinnadust in each frame. We hear their inner monologues as they explore questions of guilt and identity, while still choosing to devour the cereal in the end, much like a true crime killer would.

These dark storylines and richly detailed shooting styles vividly enhance the cereal’s taste appeal, all while driving home the character’s central conflict: the cereal squares taste so good, they can’t help but eat each other.

Teens online have taken notice and embraced our darker, more delicious story. On TikTok and IG, “Must Cinnadust” is hitting the FYP, garnering well over 2MM views with zero paid media support and spawning numerous memes and remixes.

And it’s not just getting talked about – it’s getting real business results. Our campaign reminded teens about the irresistibility of cinnadust and drove 18x the average lift in consideration (against CPG brand benchmarks on the Meta brand lift study) and resulting in market share growth for the first time in a year, despite similar media investment.