I have no idea what this ad means. But I saw it in Newsweek and had to scan it onto the blog:
I am open to anyone’s thoughts as to what this means. Here is the best I can come up with:
(In the interest of maintaining the journalistic integrity of this blog, such as it is, I must admit in my youthful days, I did eat Grape-Nuts [with yogurt]).
First, I believe this ad is, in fact, sort of a warning that accepts the science of human caused global warming. I can’t see any other explanation for the text, “Wake-Up Call.”
Second, and this is the weird part, the website NoGrapesNoNuts, while quite amusing in its own way, has nothing whatsoever to do with global warming, nor does it even have a link to this ad. So I guess the global warming stuff is just meant as an attention grabber, especially for young people, which is who the website seems targeted for. But this is the oddest attention grabber I’ve ever seen.
Third, you might see on the box “Power from Grains,” which seems to be the tag line for the cereal. Yet this is also weird — or at least bizarrely coincidental from a climate perspective — the parent company, Kraft, does not support “power from grains” (i.e., corn ethanol).
Fourth, perhaps the global warming “Wake-Up Call” is meant to connect to the notion that you eat cereal when you wake up.
Fifth, who knows?
Sixth, I can’t wait for the global warming deniers to start bombarding Kraft complaints about this ad.
Seventh, kudos to the ad writers for whatever they were trying to do — although I have been watching Mad Men on AMC via the magic of On Demand, and if modern day ad men and women are anywhere near as despicable as those depicted from the early 1960s, then all I can say to them is “You should be ashamed of yourself!”
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
