With the future of General Mills’ cereal business in jeopardy, we needed to engage consumers in our ingredient story. We had to make the news more than just a headline. With its neon colors and unnatural fruity flavors, the best place to start was Trix. Our plan was to announce that Trix was losing everything artificial. That meant artificial flavors, artificial colors … and artificial rabbits. So we fired the most iconic cereal mascot in history, and began the search to find a new, 100% real rabbit to be the new face of Trix.

We launched the campaign on Facebook with a casting call video announcing the search for the Real Trix Rabbit. Fans were invited to enter their own cute pets online¬– with the winning rabbit appearing on special Trix boxes. To continue the story we released bite-sized social videos and a multitude of still posts that bombarded our audience with content too cute to ignore. The cutest and silliest submissions were repurposed as additional Instagram and Facebook posts. This created a self-sustaining content loop that kept the campaign fresh and top of mind for the three-week casting process. The campaign was capped off with a video that thanked every single bunny that entered… it was over 8 minutes long.

A 2-pound bunny helped revive General Mills' $2.3 billion cereal business.

• Incremental volume sales increased by 21%.

• Volume sales increased at Walmart (cereal’s largest retailer) by 6%.

• Base volume sales increased by 3%.

A small investment drove big results.

• With only $125k in paid social support we received 7,594 rabbit submissions, 3.7MM social mentions, and 11.4MM impressions across social platforms.

• The campaign reached 9.9MM users and engaged over 2.86MM.

• At $1.49, the campaign's CPM was 235% more effective than category average.

• Facebook click-through rate on native content was 800% above the average.

A real rabbit generated a real cultural conversation.

• We received 33MM impressions in 3 weeks – 67% above target – including coverage from the “Today Show,” E! News, Mashable, UPROXX, The Huffington Post and industry publications.

• With a 99% positive/neutral sentiment, we turned negative perceptions about cereal into an overwhelming positive conversation.