Surreal Cereal’s marketing team was faced with a challenge: how do they make their brand stand out in a crowded market?

There’s a huge inconsistency with illustrative styles/typography which makes each element feel like totally different brand. They noticed an opportunity to go against the grain by applying a direct to consumer strategy and challenging the status quo with attention grabbing headlines with a more distinct, playful tone of voice, as they recently did in their recent free cereal campaign. Just as you thought, they are a startup that could barely afford one of these celebrities, not to mention 4 of them.We’ll never have the budgets of the cereal giants, so we try to find other ways to stand out,” Chetland says wryly. Other stunts including moving their office into a local IKEA — “we’re really childish, so thought we’d take the mickey out of all the pious founder hacks on LinkedIn and said, ‘why pay for office space when you can work from Ikea? But you’ll agree it’s almost impossible for us to want to sell and tell a story with these big names in it without duly mentioning each of them in the headline once we mention one.

The Forbes-listed brand, since its entry into the cereal scene, has employed creativity and humour to distinguish itself in the industry which has somewhat been starved of innovation for years. We spent three months creating test brands — different shapes, flavours and nutritionals — and then we used social media ads to see what people engaged with,” Gammell says. Amongst the mundanity of our daily lives, we all need a bit of playful cereal to start the day; now we can enjoy a big bowl for breakfast without the accompanying guilt. No amount of graphics, wordplay or branding will make up for such a niche notion – selling cereal to adults – as tried and failed in the US at least 10 years ago.

Available in four flavours - Frosted, Cocoa, Cinnamon and Peanut Butter, each bowl has a whopping 14 grams of protein and zero grams of sugar, making them one of the most nutritious cereals out there! The campaign will be live from July 18 to August 15, running across print and digital 96 and 48 sheets in London, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. Since their launch earlier this year, they’ve steadily been growing and gaining recognition as the new, disruptive cereal brand in the market. What’s more, the brand is working on some plastic-free packaging to keep its cereal fresh inside the protective recyclable cardboard box.

But the pair aren’t worried: “We know the big companies will look at what’s new, but we’re just focusing on what makes us different. In a recent interview with Performance Marketing World, the Co-founder of Surreal cereal, Kit Gammel and their Senior Creative John Thornton discussed how they’ve managed to creatively scale in a very saturated market within a very short time. An official statement also mentioned how Kellogg’s recently lost a court case challenging the government’s new HFSS guidelines around the sugar content of its cereals. With 14 grams of protein and zero grammes of sugar in each serving - the four delicious flavours will take you back to your childhood with every mouthful! The finance team said we’d been spending too much money, so to shut them up we made the world’s most budget billboard.

See some of Surreal’s billboards and copy, creatively deploying these 4 big names in advertising their product.

The peanut butter range features a vintage photo of a cowboy riding a peanut, while the cocoa series replaces an exercise mat with a chocolate bar. They’re the last thing any health- or eco-conscious individual would wish to consume, let alone want their children to guzzle for breakfast each day. All it took was a gazillion cardboard boxes, twelve rolls of gaffer tape, two ladders, and one fight about who got to play on the ladders. Although none of the famous bearers of these names have reacted to the creative use of their brand to sell Surreal cereal, the brand has experienced a ripple effect of these people’s influence. We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you’ve consented to and improve our understanding of you.

By opting for a protein-rich breakfast, you can make it through to lunch knowing you’ve fuelled your body with the energy it needs to win the day! We’re not made of the same stuff as traditional cereals, we avoid sugar and we’re packed with protein.