I Hate Special K

Yes, I hate the date-rape drug but I am actually talking about the cereal this time. How can a lowly box of spurious nutrition engender such hatred? Easy. This:

On a recent trip to New York, I awoke to a beautiful morning and this ad plastered about 200 feet high on the building across from my hotel. Suddenly I didn't feel like ordering breakfast any more.

Special K consistently has some of the worst marketing campaigns I've ever seen. Their marketing slogan might as well read, "We Hate Women's Bodies So You Will Too." It's even more ironic considering that their target market is women.

You Vs. The Bikini. Is there any better way to set up an adversarial relationship between a woman and her body than by reducing it to three wee pieces of fabric and a bow? It gets even better when you consider that the woman in question already has a bikini worthy body. So if she can't even wear a bikini with confidence then how can the rest of us even dream of attempting it?

Oh, but wait! They have an answer to that. Eat Special K! Specifically, replace two of your meals a day with a nutritionally void bowl of breakfast cereal. Of course you will lose weight (and your mind) this way - a bowl of Special K with the milk is a mere 160 calories. That's adds up to almost a 1000-calorie deficit for a woman used to eating a moderate 1800 calories per day.

You Vs. Your Blood Sugar. The third ingredient in Special K is sugar. The fourth is high fructose corn syrup. And that's just for the relatively tame "original" flavor. (Can you really call it a flavor if it tastes just like the box it came in?) The decadent sounding "chocolatey delight" flavor, not only has the same amount of sugar and high fructose corn syrup as Lucky Charms but also includes "chocolatey" bits - so called because there is no actual anti-oxidant bearing chocolate in them. These chocolatey bits have even more sugar and... the Great Evil of 2006: trans fats.

In a country where type II diabetes is rampant and obesity is increasing at such a rate that it has become a tenet of every presidential candidate's platform, is it really responsible to promote this as good health?

Oops, my bad. They never said it would make you healthy. They only said it will make you thin.

Comments

[delhigirl]

Incredibly offfensive to all women, I agree wholeheartedly. I also agree that the before picture is already something most women would kill for.

another offensive commercial is the Yoplait one, with the Itsy Bitsy bikini song

[CharlotteHilton]

Hah! Good call on the yoplait commercial. Totally forgot about that one!

[OnTheCusp]

I remember the "pinch an inch" commercials too, but at least back then, the men got their bellies pinched as well as the women. The worst Special K ad for me is the one where a mom and her daughter are going through mom's old college clothes, and the GenY daughter says: "I can't believe YOU ever used to wear THESE jeans!" Then the 'boomer mom dutifully eats her cereal day after day until she can triumphantly demand her old jeans back from her "shocked" daughter. So, see, it's not enough for women to be in a war against their OWN bodies, but somehow must also be in competition with daughters and younger women as well. This kind of sentiment breeds hatred all around: for the self, for other women, for youth, for aging and even for men (who don't get this kind of vitriol aimed at them to anywhere near the dregree women do.) Ultimately it is up to women to love themselves and stop buying into this crap.

[CharlotteHilton]

Wow, I've never seen that one but I'm offended just reading your description! Thanks for another excellent example of their crap.

[TVDinner666]

Thank you for this post. I've found their marketing unbelievably offensive for ages.

[singermuse]

It is amazing how one can avoid these god awful blatantly misogynist ads by just turning off the TV, though I can't say much for huge ugly billboards.
I've never eaten "not-so-special-K" and stopped eating boxed cold cereals over 30 years ago. Auggh!
A nice bowl of organic oatmeal (without all the sugar and "high-fatality" corn syrup) with a side of fresh fruit would be so much better, more nutritious and filling to boot! Slow food ROCKS!

[GeeBee]

What's with all this stuff all over the blogs about high fructose corn syrup? It's nothing special, it's just fructose (duh!), the sugar we all get from eating fruit, and a lot of it (hence the "high") and water. One poster I read somewhere recently called it "corn-based sweetener", and claimed it was toxic. However I also heard a nutritionist on TV recently who gave it a more realistic assessment.. He said there was nothing inherently wrong with it, except for one thing - it's dirt cheap.

[recless]

Does anyone really think that advertising would work if they used UNATTRACTIVE models?

[azusmom]

That's not really the point she's trying to make, here. As consumers, we need to be savvy. They want us to believe that we NEED their product, and we don't. They want us to believe it's a magic bullet for weight loss and health. It isn't. They want us to believe that no woman is ever thin enough, including the models in their ads, and THAT is disgusting.

When I was a kid, around 8 or 9, I saw the Special K "Can you pinch more than an inch" ads. My friends and I were all convinced we were fat, and went on a diet, setting up a destructive pattern that lasted for 20 years.