Craving Entertainment

Would you pay $26.75 to let your kids roam around inside a cereal commercial for an hour?

I did. Once.

It was a family trip to Mall of America and finally, after months of curiosity — brought on by huge posters of the Trix Rabbit and Lucky the Leprechaun pasted around the mall — the venue’s newest attraction was open. It’s the General Mills Cereal Adventure, “Where your favorite cereals come to life!” (Mills’ Minneapolis headquarters are just down the road.)

Cereal Adventure is amusement park meets cereal factory meets McDonald’s Playland on a sugar rush. It’s bright. It’s busy. It’s bone-grindingly loud. And from the 25-foot fiberglass characters at the entrance to the exit through the company store, it’s branding all the way.

For $5.95 ($3.95 for kids), you get six attractions, starting with Farm to Factory (follow wheat from field to table) and ending with the Cocoa Puff Chocolate Canyon videogame arcade. The Trix Fruity Carnival (Rabbit Race skee ball) blends with the Lucky Charms Magical Forest (giant, spinning foam shamrocks). There’s the Cheerios Play Park for toddlers (slide down a spoon!), a Wheaties Hall of Champions gallery of vintage boxes, and a demo “theater” that plays old commercials.

When we visited opening week, earnest young staffers in Cheerios-yellow polo shirts milled around smiling hard. A silent, costumed Sonny (you know: “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs! Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!”) roamed around with a Polaroid. My daughter stopped sliding down the Lucky Charms rainbow long enough for a snap. She had a frenzied gleam in her eye.

There’s Cereal Adventure Café serving, yes, cereal and milk, but also Indoor S’mores, Trix on a Stick, and Wheaties Breakfast of Champions Bars. Prices are comparable to the food court next door.

This isn’t just a local attraction, mind you: A recent General Mills FSI invited you all to come share the fun of grain. In its first month, Cereal Adventure had visitors from 44 states.

Wholesome Fun?

I found it all heavy on the Cereal, light on the Adventure. But my daughter loved it. She “designed” her own box of cereal — coloring the box, choosing a name, printing the label, and picking three brands to mix in, sending it along an authentic assembly line for pick-up in the store downstairs. She ate that $7 box of cereal for a week, sharing it with the slumber party crowd on her birthday. A month after it’s gone, she still raves about it.

“It’s like you’re buying a real box of cereal!” she beams. I say two words to her: Grocery store. She waves me off. “It’s much cooler to buy cereal at Mall of America. They’ve got this whole cereal factory shoved in the corner! It’s, like, strange.”

It bugs me that she likes it so much. She likes the Mall’s Camp Snoopy, too, which costs us $30 minimum per visit and we end up eating fried cheese curds — which are, I admit, less healthful than Cocoa Puffs. Call me cranky, but to my mind Peanuts are “real” characters worth paying for a ride (even if it is on the Pepsi Ripsaw Roller Coaster). But cereal ad characters? Those should be free.

General Mills says no one has complained about paying admission for such ad-based fun. “It’s definitely a branded experience,” admits spokesperson Liv Lane. “[But] it’s amazing how people connect with these brands and get past the feeling that it’s a commercial property.”

There were parts that I liked. The assembly line and Farm to Factory showed the inner workings of a cereal plant, and served up some interesting factoids. (Cheerios shoot out of the puffing machine at 350 mph. The toasters are 60 to 80 feet long.) But the rest of the Adventure was just advertising come to life, the same old brand messages we dodge every day.

Cereal Adventure crosses the line between marketing, which is free to consumers, and entertainment that isn’t. Lots of brands are using entertainment to sell these days, but I can’t think of any others that are charging admission. It sticks in my craw.

Still, I confess I liked the Trix Rabbit postcards and Frankenberry bobble-head dolls in the store. And if your favorite cereal happens to be Cocoa Puffs, maybe you not only know that the bird’s name is Sonny, but you’d like having a photo op with him. Maybe cereal matters enough to some people to make an amusement park worth $5.95.

Here’s the MBA question: Are brands more valuable if consumers pay something to experience them? If you wrote this thesis and know whether it’s true, call me.

In the meantime, I’ll be fending off my daughter’s pleas to visit Cereal Adventure again. At least she and I agree on one thing: It’s, like, strange.