Good things out of capitalism

Rico says Tanzina Vega has an article in The New York Times about a great idea from Kellogg"

BREAKFAST eaters around the country are photographing their bowls of cereal, plates of eggs and assorted pastries, not out of a personal obsession with food but for a more wholesome reason: giving breakfast to children in need.
For each breakfast photo a user uploads to their website, the Kellogg Company will donate a breakfast to a child who might otherwise go without. The project is part of a national advertising campaign for Kellogg called Share Your Breakfast, which will support National Breakfast Day on Tuesday.
The campaign is the largest integrated marketing effort for Kellogg, including broadcast, print, digital, and social media, said Doug VanDeVelde, the senior vice president for marketing and innovation at the Kellogg Company. “We find there’s a lot of people who don’t have access to breakfast,” Mr. VanDeVelde said. “We just felt like as the breakfast leader, we should do something about that.”
To that end, Kellogg worked with the national nonprofit volunteer organization Action for Healthy Kids with the goal of donating a million breakfasts to underserved children for the 2011-12 school year. (This is not the first time Kellogg has worked with Action for Healthy Kids: it has previously provided grant money to the organization for school lunches.)
Schools where at least fifty percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced-price meals will receive the breakfasts. The Kellogg Company will donate up to $200,000 toward the effort.
As of Sunday, more than 800 photos of breakfasts had been uploaded. About half the photos featured Kellogg products, while others were more daring inventions like a plate of fried eggs flanked by blueberries, accompanied by a few leaves of baby spinach surrounded by toast slathered with peanut butter and topped with banana slices.
Users can also text a photo or a description of their breakfast with the word “share” to 21534. The promotion runs through July. Users who want to use Twitter to share their breakfast can post a message to the social networking site using the tag #ShareUrBreakfast.
For the website and other interactive elements of the campaign, Kellogg worked with its digital agency of record, Biggs-Gilmore Communications. Digital banner ads will run across the Google ad network and Web sites like AOL.com and Weather.com. Digital ads aimed at Hispanics will run on the Batanga and Google networks. Ads will also run on various mobile sites in both English and Spanish.
A thirty-second television spot created by the Leo Burnett Company, Kellogg’s agency of record and part of the Publicis Groupe, shows workers setting up a long table on a quiet tree-lined street as neighbors start to wake up in the morning. The table is then covered with a white and red checkered tablecloth. Bowls and boxes of cereal are placed on the table as neighbors congregate and start to eat.
The ad, called Big Breakfast, will have its debut and be shown nationally during network shows like Today, Good Morning America, and the CBS Morning News, and on cable on Bravo, TBS and OWN, where Gayle King will promote the campaign on her show. The spots will also be shown on Spanish-language TV, like the Telemundo network.
Leo Burnett also created the print ads, which have been running since mid-February in magazines like Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, O The Oprah Magazine, Working Mother, and the Spanish-language Ser Padres.
For National Breakfast Day, Kellogg will hold an event in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The company will provide a free breakfast of cereal, breakfast bars, fruit, and beverages. The event will be hosted by Melissa Joan Hart, best known as the star of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. She will be joined by the Kellogg characters Tony the Tiger and Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Dennis M. Walcott, New York City deputy mayor, will be there to share his breakfast and to show the city’s support.
National Breakfast Day was established in 1989 by the School Nutrition Association to raise awareness about the links between breakfast and academic achievement. The day takes place during National School Breakfast Week.
For Ms. Hart, Kellogg has always been a part of her life. When she was eight years old, she did a television commercial for the brand. After that, her classmates called her “the Rice Krispies” girl, Ms. Hart said. The Agriculture Department says one in four children goes without breakfast in the United States. “That is heartbreaking to me, especially being a mom,” Ms. Hart said. “It’s kind of hard to imagine something like that happening in our country.”
In addition to the food donation aspect of the campaign, Mr. VanDeVelde thinks the message will appeal the most to mothers and baby boomers. “Moms are our primary target consumers,” Mr. VanDeVelde said. “Moms buy most of the cereal that gets eaten.” The baby boomer population presents other opportunities for Kellogg. “It’s a generation that grew up eating a lot of cereal,” Mr. VanDeVelde said.
According to data from Kantar Media, Kellogg spent $464.9 million on advertising from January through September 2010, the latest figures available, and $454 million from January 2009 through September 2009.
Kellogg will also offer promotions across many of its brands, including Rice Krispies, Mini-Wheats, Eggo Waffles, Nutri-Grain bars and Corn Flakes. Cereal boxes will have promotional labeling, and some will contain books of discount coupons for Kellogg products.
In-store efforts will include partnerships with retailers like Wal-Mart, with in-store signs and specific Wal-Mart packaging for Kellogg products. Kellogg also has an application on the company’s Facebook page where people can upload photos of their breakfasts.