So, Corn Pops cereal from Kelloggs has a new commercial. Admittedly, I’ve only seen it once at 6:30 a.m, half asleep, but it goes something like this: the Corn Pop is stuck in his house and scared and he opens the door and a bunch of ghost pirate milk bottles with creepy white eyes are groaning and coming towards his door. My initial reaction was ‘Wow, they still make that?’ Aidan is now so frightened of this commercial that he had nightmares about it a couple of times and pleads with me to pray, nightly, that he doesn’t have nightmares. It came on when I was sitting in there and he ran to me and pleaded with me to turn off the TV.

Well, I thought I’d write Kelloggs consumer affairs department with a ‘gosh, am I the only one with a scared kid? Maybe fear isn’t a good idea for marketing.’ Following is the ever so generic response. Hopefully, “Let’s scare the snot out of kids so they’ll buy our non popular cereal” isn’t a sentence that gets uttered by their marketing department but somehow I think it might be.

Mr. Juvinall,

Thank you for contacting our company regarding the advertising for Kellogg’s® Corn Pops® cereal. We sincerely appreciate your interest.

We are sorry to hear that the commercial gave your child nightmares. Viewer reaction, such as yours, is helpful to us and taken into consideration when developing future advertisements.  Your concerns have been forwarded to the appropriate company officials and we hope future ads for this and our other products will be more acceptable to you.

Again, thank you for sharing your views and interest in our company.

Sincerely,

Consumer Affairs Department