GENERAL MILLS + HOLLYWOOD
What if General Mills brands were more entertainment-forward? Lucky the Leprechaun, The Pillsbury Dough Boy, Frankenberry, Count Chocula, and Trix the Rabbit are all legendary characters with biggers stories just waiting to be told.
ROLE: Director of Content, idea/Creative Director
FOR: General Mills
PRESS: Washington Post, Hypebeast
Rather than go the “branded content” route, we decided to treat these characters as actual actors/talent and pitch their stories and backgrounds to actual Hollywood studios and talent agencies.
How do we break into the Hollywood machine and make some noise in a highly competitive arena? We don’t. We get Hollywood to come to us.
On Halloween, we ran a parody billboard of the famous “Angelyne boards” in place of hers on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood. Angelyne is to Sunset as The Naked Cowboy is to Times Square. She’s famous for going to extreme lengths to get in front of Hollywood execs and is the real-life inspiration for Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.
The billboards drove our audience to a site that presented our characters, and our hopes, wishes, and dreams. We also ran an open brief to Hollywood in Variety magazine. There we asked for Hollywood’s help in turning our characters into the next cartoon superstars. From feature films to young-adult novels, to video games to podcasts, we offered our intellectual property up to the best storytellers in the world. We also had our characters show up at The Viper Room and Chateau Marmont, and the paparazzi caught Lisa Rina helping our Monsters get in shape for upcoming roles.
The response was overwhelming and humbling. Are there feature films in development? We can neither confirm nor deny.
