Super Cereal

<< Tony the Tiger gives his opinion on the Crunchy Nut ad: "It's not grrrrreat"

I was feeling short of inspiration tonight so decided to base my fact-hunting on what I consider to be the worst advert currently on TV - the one for Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes with the 'Crunchy Nut Lane'. The idea behind it is that CNCF (as they're called in the business) are so damned delicious that just having to sit through the drive home without them is too much to bear. So they introduce 'Crunchy Nut Lanes' - gold-coloured extra lanes on the road so you can beat the traffic and get your honeyed fix as soon as possible.

Of course, the trouble is that people would use these lanes whether they want a bowl of CNCF or not - nobody actually wants to sit in traffic, it's not that those flakes are so tasty, they're draggin' people away from something they actually want to be doing. This is the point where the idea should have been consigned to the dustbin, like so many soggy uneaten flakes of corn. But no, they pursued it, and decided that you have to have a pass (!) to use this lane, and that if you try to use it without one, there's an entire surveillance center, complete with talking cameras, just to repel them back into the ordinary lanes with all the other toast-munching saps.

It's a shame that, having already made it so ridiculously convoluted I can't remember whether it's advertising car tax or a bowl of cereal, they don't go the whole hog and explain how you actually go about getting this pass. Surely all that can be asked is a commitment, potentially but not necessarily monetary, to CNCF. I wonder if there's anyone who has to crawl round the South Circular to get home every night who wouldn't cough up for a few boxes of Crunchy Nut in order to get a whole lane to themselves. Although if everyone could get these passes it wouldn't really be that much quicker. This is what makes this ad so infuriating - it's supposed to make me want cereal, not ponder the machinations of a snack loyalty based traffic control system. It's really, really shit. Here's the fact:

Kellogg's Corn Flakes were invented by accident.

Dr John Harvey Kellogg, in his attempts to invent a crushed wheat treat, he inadvertently ran some day-old wheat through rollers, and made Corn Flakes. I wish he hadn't bothered - they wouldn't take up space in the Variety packs, and we wouldn't have that stinking CNCF ad.