The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By Noel Young, Correspondent

June 10, 2013 | 3 min read

A charming ad for Cheerios showing a mixed-race family - which produced , as the Drum reported , an avalanche of vitriol on You Tube - seemingly did the cereal some good .

From May 28 (when the spot launched) to June 5, cross-Web brand exposure was up 77 percent compared to the week before, according to research by Kontera, the San Francisco-based content marketing firm .

Comparing Cheerios to how often consumers were viewing the content of eight other breakfast cereals, among them Rice Krispies, Cap'n Crunch, Wheaties, Special K and Honey Bunches of Oats. Cheerios beat their average content views by 137 percent, Kontera says.

The tech company came to the findings by analysing hundreds of millions of daily traditional Web, social Web and mobile content views.

At one point General Mills the cereal's maker had chosen to disable some racial You Tube comments.

The YouTube comments section, had "devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, "troglodytes" and "racial genocide, " reported Adweek. Some people said the ad disgusted them.

The humorous and beautifully shot ad featured a black dad, a white mum and their mixed-race daughter."representative of tens of thousands of actual couples in America. " said Adweek.

Yet it "stuck out like a sore thumb,' said the magazine, asking, "At what point will an ad like this just seem normal?

"It shouldn't be a story but is—an ad from a major U.S. brand featuring an interracial couple and their daughter.

" The problem is that TV ads have always lagged TV programming in this regard, as so many brands are clearly scared of being perceived as making a political statement with the casting of their commercials. "

Camille Gibson, the brand's vice president of marketing, said in a statement: "Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families, and we celebrate them all.

"Some YouTube] comments that were made were, in our view, not family friendly. And that was really the trigger for us to pull them off."

Following the marketing report by Kontera , Adweek said "Ridiculous attacks by fringe crazies can be a big blessing for a politician when he or she is the target of such vitriol—and it appears the same is true in the world of brands."