Create boundary-breaking earned media coverage and social buzz around the full range of feel-good flavors of Kellogg’s® Special K cereal while answering to a pandemic cultural truth that we saw echoed in memes, social chatter and even texts with friends – every single day in 2020 felt exactly the same.
In a tumultuous news cycle dominated by the rapidly changing COVID-19 landscape and social and political unrest, we needed to create a PR campaign that broke through with a relatable insight, demonstrated an understanding of our shared pandemic struggle and put Kellogg’s® Special K products at the forefront of a light-hearted solution.
We decided to address a 2020 cultural truth we’d seen resounding in Internet culture and in our own daily lives – that Blursday feeling. For those unfamiliar with the term, “Blursday” can be defined, as “the day you are presently living in, but in reality, you have no idea what day it actually is.
So, with every day feeling like Blursday, Special K turned to its variety of favored flavors to help fans keep their days straight.
We started with data. To do this, we partnered with Twitter and Twitter Data to tap into real people’s conversations and discover which flavors Americans are talking about and when. These delicious discussions inspired Special K to match-up flavors we want to the days we seem to really want them.
Then, we tapped into nostalgia to fight those “wait, what day is it?” woes. We threw it back to simpler times – when we told the days of the week apart with the likes of undies, socks and PJ sets – to create the Special K Blursday Go-Away Kit. Packed with everything you need to distinguish a Tuesday from Thursday, the kit included day-of-the-week socks, a weekly planner and seven boxes of Special K all inspired by our feel-good cereals and those real Twitter conversations:
In September, we premiered the Special K Blursday Go-Away Kit to the masses with widespread earned media outreach and a press release detailing how fans can get theirs, an infographic uncovering how to beat Blursday with delicious flavor and social promotion from the experts at Twitter Data and our celebrity partner -- fashionista, TV star and busy mom Whitney Port.
We wanted to make it simple, easy and cost-free for fans to get their hands on a Blursday Go-Away kit, so we listed the limited-edition item on our Kellogg’s Family Rewards website and invited fans nationwide to enter to win via a sweepstakes. The contest was listed at www.kfr.com/BlursdayGiveaway and at the end (Oct. 4 at 11:59:59 PM) of the entry period, 700 winners were randomly selected and received their very own Special K Blursday Go-Away Kit.
The best part? Even weeks after the campaign wrapped, Special K fans were taking to social media to share their excitement about receiving the kits, thanking the brand for helping them finding a whole new (and delicious!) way to tell the days apart.
Blursday cured.
We broke Kellogg’s® Special K out of its traditional food media swim lane, landing big wins with hard-to-reach entertainment, fashion and trending news outlets by building a campaign derived from a relatable insight that used nostalgia and our delicious food to solve a common headache: Blursday.
We secured over 100 placements that generated more than 300 million impressions with 99% positive sentiment for the brand, including headline coverage in E! News, Yahoo! Life, MSN, AllRecipes, HYPEBAE, Trendhunter, Red Tricycle, and more, and, ultimately, drove over 1,000 consumer entries to win the kits.
