Surreal Cereals is a business that sells premium high-protein, low sugar, healthy cereals that is based in London but I bet you haven’t heard of them until recently.

Founded in 2021 by two former Vito Coco employees, the product is already stocked in many national retailers (including Holland & Barrett, Boots and Selfridge’s) and has taken the marketing world by storm.

Despite their smaller size than their multinational competitors, Surreal have taken a bold approach to advertising putting amusing but legally dubious content in bright colours on billboards across London.

Their most notable campaign to date which garnered a huge amount of national and international media attention was where they solicited the opinions of people with famous names and used them as endorsements.

This rather unorthodox method of endorsing their product combined with tongue-in-cheek humour on social media (like all the best brands these days) suddenly made Surreal very famous after both the marketing and sporting press took notice.

However, the adverts Surreal produced are definitely in the grey area of advertising law as to some authoritarian legislators it could be deemed misleading.

To combat this, Surreal then released another amusing campaign playing on the now common trick of ‘we are appeasing our lawyers’ to try and create the impression that the creative and playful little guy has been stopped by the uncompromising force of the law.

These adverts are very clever in that they don’t say a lot (for ‘legal reasons’) but what you assume makes you see Surreal in a positive light for their sense of humour.

The tongue-in-cheek mocking of the wording of the Consumer Rights Act 2015; the amusing small print; and the redacted words left to your own imagination all add up to an advertising campaign that would capture the minds of the many walking by and possibly stick in their memory.

Surreal have also paired the wildly successful print advertising campaign with sales promotion discounts in order to try and capitalise on the swathes of people now aware of the brand as they try and make the premium prices more palatable for the mass market.

Many see billboards as an outdated form of advertising as people live in a digital world and are less aware of their surroundings with the signage that is put up often being defaced by vandals.

Surreal have opposed this as they have made print advertising on billboards very cool and raised great awareness of their brand in a relative cost effective manner compared to the size of the media coverage they have had.

Do comment your thoughts below.