The other day the General Mills cereal brand, Cheerios, made a tweet honoring Prince and his early passing. But their visual tribute sparked some outrage on twitter forcing them to delete that tweet!
As a former student in advertising design, these types of misunderstandings in visuals happen all the time and they’re usually cringe-worthy when you pay attention to detail. But lets get into it…
At 2:17 pm on the day of Prince’s passing, Cheerios posted a tweet paying tribute to the early icon. The tribute was of a visual containing a purple background with the words, “Rest in peace,” and they replaced the dot in the letter ‘i’ with a Cheerio.
Now as a graphic designer, I have no idea how the art director at Cheerios let this pass but that visual was certainly a questionable way to pay tribute.
As it is, Cheerios’ logo contains a similar design as their Prince tribute(the Cheerio in the ‘i’), so I completely understand how people could misinterpret their message as an advertisement exploiting his death.
Pretty much people felt that Cheerios, or General Mills, was taking advantage of such a huge moment worldwide to promote their cereal brand. This really isn’t a misinterpretation without merit because that is certainly what it looks like.
After continuous backlash from the twitter community, Cheerios removed the tweet. But of course this is the internet so deleting the tweet didn’t stop those who already screenshot and circulated the image elsewhere.
What happened here is a textbook mistake in the advertising world and one that will probably be brought up in many advertising design courses of what not to do.
Source: Tech Times