William Shatner’s Raisin Bran Cameo Is a Super Bowl Setup

The faux-candid rollout locations Raisin Bran squarely inside a rising pattern of brands using staged paparazzi moments to advertise their merchandise. It’s an strategy that blurs the road between leisure, tabloid tradition, and promoting.

Within the final 24 months, manufacturers together with CeraVe and Velveeta have used such ways, dispatching celebrities into public areas with merchandise conspicuously in hand.

CeraVe’s Tremendous Bowl marketing campaign famously fueled weeks of hypothesis by sending Michael Cera around New York carrying bags of moisturizer, whereas Velveeta enlisted Julia Fox to debut a branded hair look courtside at a Knicks sport. In every case, the photographs weren’t leaked a lot as choreographed.

For Raisin Bran, tapping Shatner provides a winking layer to the components. The actor’s outsized persona transforms the concept of him being caught with cereal right into a gag, guaranteeing the reveal lands as a punchline relatively than a bait-and-switch.

If the aim was to make a fiber-forward cereal a part of the Tremendous Bowl dialog earlier than kickoff, mission achieved.