Advertising
The first Apple Jacks mascot in the 1960s was "Apple Jack", a figure made from cutting a mouth onto an apple and applying a hat and pieces of cereal for eyes.
Television advertisements featuring Apple Jack had the tagline “A bowl a day keeps the bullies away!”, but was later altered to “A bowl a day gives you energy to play!”.
In the late 1960s the box depicted an "Apple Car" with pieces of cereal for wheels.
Around 1971, the official mascots became "The Apple Jacks Kids", a simplistically drawn animated boy and girl. The commercials featured the children singing and tumbling around all day. Their reign lasted for 21 years, making them the most well-known Apple Jacks mascots and most universally associated with the cereal in the public's memory. During this time, the Apple Jacks jingle became an integral part of the ad campaign: "A is for apple, J is for Jacks, Cinnamon-toasty Apple Jacks!" This campaign was retired in 1992.
Starting in 1992, there was an advertising campaign that featured children expressing their enjoyment of Apple Jacks, regardless of its lack of apple flavor. The slogan for this campaign became "We eat what we like". The shift toward marketing cereals directly at children signaled the growing recognition of children's influence on family purchases. The commercials took place in normal kid hang-outs, such as: at school, the garage, ballet class, and the kitchen, in the hall/hallway/door jamb, among others. In each commercial, a group of children are having Apple Jacks, when suddenly, some other people, such as adults or jealous kids, bash the group claiming it does not taste like apples and asks why they love it so much. The group then explains their love of the cereal usually by just saying, "We just do", and at the end of the commercial, would pose for a group Polaroid.[6]
As of 2004, the marketing mascots were a carefree Jamaican cinnamon stick named CinnaMon and an accident-prone apple named Bad Apple. Labeled as Apple Jacks Adventures in print advertising, the commercials focused on CinnaMon upstaging Bad Apple by reaching a bowl of Apple Jacks before he can, in spite of the apple's attempts to stop him. Bad Apple's antagonistic nature was later dropped due to complaints from non-profit health food organizations such as Center for Science in the Public Interest over the campaign discouraging children from eating fruit by antagonizing the Apple character, leading to Apple and CinnaMon being portrayed as highly competitive friends, both getting into the bowl. The campaign was slated to be retired in 2007, and replaced by a retread of the 1990s campaign focused on children, but fan response to Apple and CinnaMon helped them remain as the mascots.[7] In 2007, Apple and CinnaMon were fused together with CinnaMon sticking through the center of Apple with both of their legs at the bottom of their body. They remained this way for a few of the commercials until they became unstuck by a special machine.
