One
of the things we miss most about childhood is the prizes we used to get in
cereal boxes. It was a genuine thrill to open up a box, pour out some of that
sweet breakfast treat, and out would come a toy. There were all sorts of prizes
packaged into the boxes over they years, and we’ve probably gotten most of them
at some time or another.
So we decided to compile a list of ten facts about
cereal companies and the toys they put in their boxes:
- W.K. Kellogg was the
first to use this marketing strategy, making a book called The
Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures Book available to purchasers of
two boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, who could pick the book up in stores.
- The book prize
premium marketing campaign that Kellogg’s used turned out to be a fairly
successful venture. They continued using it for then next 23 years, with
an estimated 2.5 million books having been distributed. This, even after
they began charging 10 cents a copy.
- The 1954
introduction of the wildly popular baking powder submarine prize coincided
with the commission of the first nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus,
which fueled its success as a cereal box prize.
- In 1974, the Federal
Trade Commission nearly banned television commercials for cereal brands
that used prizes in the packages as a means of selling the product. The
FTC was pushing to eliminate deceptive advertising, and felt that the
prizes were inducing children to eat a product they considered to be too
high in sugar.
- In addition to
prizes placed in the box, there have also been prizes placed on cereal
boxes over the years as well. Prizes including 45 rpm records,
superhero masks, and holograms have at various times been affixed to box
exteriors.
- As technology
increasingly permeated pop culture, cereal box prizes increased in
sophistication along with it. Cereal box prizes were known to include
things like compter games and CD’s to appeal to the more tech-savvy kids.
- According to the Internet Museum of
Flexi/Cardboard/Oddity Records , which boasts a huge collection
of cereal box records, the first cereal to use records as a prize was
Wheaties, back in the 1950′s.
- According to a
mathematical study conducted at Illinois University, if a company offers a
set of six different prizes in their cereal boxes, a kid would have to eat
14.7 boxes of the stuff in order to insure he’d collect all six prizes.
- From 1945 through
1947, Kellogg’s had offered 5 sets of buttons depicting popular comic
strip characters. Each set contained 18 different characters, meaning that
cereal munchers needed to collect 90 different pins. Oh, professor …
- Cheerios Dollars,
which were Sacagawea Dollars packaged into 5,500 boxes of Cheerios in
order to raise public awareness of the new Sacagawea Dollar, were
discovered to have been struck from different minting dies than the rest
of the dollars. They are now worth as much as $25,000 apiece.
Suzanne Cullen
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