Honey Bunches of Oats
Brand strategy, campaign development, and launch creative for Honey Bunches of Oats Chocolate cereal.
Role Executive Creative Director
Client Post Consumer Brands / Honey Bunches of Oats
Timeline 3-month engagement
The Challenge
Launching a new flavor for an iconic, decades-old cereal brand comes with a specific creative tension: how do you generate excitement for something new without alienating the consumers who already love what exists? Honey Bunches of Oats Chocolate needed to feel like a genuine, crave-worthy addition to the lineup, not a departure from it.
The task was to introduce the new flavor across organic, paid, and PR channels with a cohesive creative system built to scale from a :06 pre-roll to a full social campaign.
The Idea
The creative concept centered on visual transformation, a way of connecting the new Chocolate flavor directly to the original product consumers already knew and loved.
The hero device: pouring chocolate milk directly into the box, visually showing the transformation from the familiar Honey Bunches of Oats to its new chocolate counterpart in real time. It wasn't a product demo. It was a visual metaphor that made the relationship between old and new immediately clear, same brand, new dimension. The motion-driven approach let rich food photography and video do the storytelling, leading with indulgence while keeping strong brand recognition intact.
Content Capture
I led a two-day on-site production to capture the full asset library for the launch. Everything needed for organic, paid, and PR was captured in a single production window — :30, :15, and :06 paid video spots, static social assets, and PR visuals, all built around the chocolate transformation concept and designed to flex across every channel and placement.
The goal was a cohesive creative system where every asset, regardless of format or length, felt like it came from the same campaign.
Distribution
Assets were deployed across Honey Bunches of Oats' owned social channels and across retail platforms including Walmart and major grocery partners, supporting awareness and trial at both the brand level and the point of purchase.
Impact
The campaign launched the new flavor with a cohesive creative system designed to scale across digital, social, and retail environments.