Sorry for the long post, but I haven’t posted anything in a while and this is awesome.
Ad guy 1: “So, you know Wheaties?”
Ad guy 2: “The gross cereal that tricks you into eating it by putting athletes on the box?”
Ad guy 1: “Yeah. What do they want?”
Ad guy 2: “They want a new box.”
Ad guy 1: “That they’ll then fill with an improved, less gross version of their cereal?”
Ad guy 2: “No. They just want to put athletes on the front of it. But, like, in a new way.”
Ad guy 1: “A new way? Like how?”
Ad guy 2: “Well, they want this new cereal to be edgy.”
Ad guy 1: “How the hell can a cereal be edgy? Cereal is just grains and sugar.”
Ad guy 2: “I don’t know. Mountain Dew made sugar water edgy with snowboarding and stuff. We can do this.”
Ad guy 1: “Okay, so we use athletes from extreme sports and show them doing cool stuff on the box instead of just posing on the front with a bunch of medals. Done! Let’s go to lunch.”
Ad guy 2: “No, no. That won’t work. People don’t recognize extreme sports stars anymore. Turns out, the general public can only watch some guy do the same stupid skateboarding trick a few hundred times before they lose interest.”
Ad guy 1: “I guess you’re right. Skateboarding is mostly dudes falling down, anyway. I heard a rumor that in the 70s, a bunch of crooked doctors funded a campaign to popularize skateboarding as a way to get kids to injure themselves more often.”
Ad guy 2: “That’d make sense. But we could run with this injury angle. Could we show an injured skateboarding guy on the front of the box? Like, we get a photo of Tony Hawk clutching a broken knee, and then we photoshop in a bowl of Wheaties next to him? And like, the Wheaties are on a skateboard, and there’s blood on the skateboard? That’s pretty edgy.”
Ad guy 1: “That’s close, but it’s not enough. The fact remains that extreme sports just aren’t edgy anymore, not even when Tony Hawk gets very badly hurt. Besides, the Wheaties people want something… darker.”
Ad guy 2: “Like Tony Hawk getting stabbed?”
Ad guy 1: “Not quite. The Wheaties people said they want to scare people.”
Ad guy 2: “Scare them?”
Ad guy 1: “Yeah. Like, while they’re eating breakfast. They said their ideal customer is an athletic man between the ages of 16 and 35. He tries to eat healthy, and he wants a food that’ll scare him every morning.”
Ad guy 2: “Why would somebody want that?”
Ad guy 1: “Well, our research department says that aren’t buying as much coffee. Our economy’s bad, people are looking for work, and using coffee to wake up in the morning just isn’t affordable anymore.”
Ad guy 2: “So they scare themselves?”
Ad guy 1: “Right. People are skipping the coffee and getting a rush from being scared out of their minds. Apparently, adrenaline is the new caffeine.”
Ad guy 2: “Hmmm. So maybe we put scary stuff in the box? Like, they pour out their Wheaties, and oh no, there’s a bunch of spiders! Or maybe we put a time bomb in the box, and when they find the bomb they have a minute to defuse it. Only the instructions are hidden in the box, but when they dig for it, oh no, there’s a bunch of spiders!”
Ad guy 1: “I like where you’re going, but the Wheaties people want customers to be afraid before they even open the box.”
Ad guy 2: “So, the spiders could go-“
Ad guy 1: “No spiders.”
Ad guy 2: “Dang. So, the scary stuff could go… on the front of the box?”
Ad guy 1: “Right. And we should still use athletes. But how do we make athletes scary?”
Ad guy 2: “They wear scary masks!”
Ad guy 1: “I like it, but customers won’t know the people wearing masks are athletes. They’ll just see a guy wearing a mask.”
Ad guy 2: “So we tell them. We show a closeup of a guy in a bloody hockey mask, and underneath that we say ‘Wheaties: LeBron James is a murderer.’ And then in the background there’s a basketball with a knife in it.”
Ad guy 1: “Nah, no masks. People won’t get scared if they have to read.”
Ad guy 2: “You’re right. Reading is boring. You can’t be terrified if you’re sleeping.”
Ad guy 1: “So, let’s take out the words. What do we have left?”
Ad guy 2: “An athlete’s face. Without a scary mask. And no spiders.”
Ad guy 1: “So we could just make their face scary.”
Ad guy 2: “What if they came out of the dark?”
Ad guy 1: “Like a mugger?”
Ad guy 2: “Or a rapist!”
Ad guy 1: “Yes!”
Ad guy 2: “Should we specify which one they are? Peyton Manning: Now he’s a mugger, and he’s gonna cut you in an alley!”
Ad guy 1: “No, no. The scariest stuff is what you don’t know. Is that sports guy emerging from the darkness to take your money? Slit your throat? Chloroform you and throw you into a van? You don’t know! All you know is that a sports guy is staring into your soul and he looks like he wants to hurt you.”
Ad guy 2: “Think of how that’ll look on shelves! A wall of sports guys that look like muggers, murderers, and rapists! They’ll look like a creepy gang.”
Ad guy 1: “That Froot Loops bird is going to look like a little bitch in comparison.”
Ad guy 2: “Can you imagine going to your pantry in the morning? You’re sleepy, you’re hungry. You just want to get something to eat and get the shit scared out of you so you can go to work full and awake and terrified. Then you open your pantry and LOOK OUT, KEVIN GARNETT FROM THE BOSTON CELTICS IS GOING TO GET YOU!”
Ad guy 1: “Then, after you pour yourself a bowl of gross Wheaties, you can leave the box on the breakfast table so Kevin Garnett can stare at you from the shadows while you eat. It’ll be like going to prison! Can you imagine the adrenaline rush? The thrill of almost getting shanked by a larger inmate during prison breakfast, but in the safety of your own home!”
Ad guy 2: “Cereal boxes really don’t feature enough photos of large men staring at you.”
Ad guy 1: “I know! We’re geniuses. People are really going to be afraid of this box of cereal.”
Ad guy 2: “And of course, we’ll include a little spoon of cereal beneath the staring head so people don’t think we’re selling a box of rape whistles or something.”
Ad guy 1: “That’s important. We’re scaring people so they buy healthy cereal, not rape whistles.”
Ad guy 2: “Wow. We are really good at designing cereal boxes.”
Ad guy 1: “I know. We are definitely real people.”
AND THEN THEY MADE THE HORRIBLE FEAR BOXES, PICTURED ABOVE
