Remember Frosties Ad Kid?

 

Recently I accidentally had some Kelloggs Frosties for breakfast and they were dreadfully sweet even though they probably don't contain as much sugar now as in their heyday. It reminded me that back in 2006 the most annoying advert ever appeared on our screens and accumulated a lot of hate on the day's favoured online platforms. For a while `Frosties Ad Kid` became the most disliked person on the Internet. Luckily Twitter only just launched that year and was still relatively small or it could have been worse.  You may recall the ad in which a bog brush barnetted boy was seen singing tunelessly in a Suggs from Madness stylee about how the cereal is “gonna taste great” as he leads the whole town along the street like some Frosties Pied Piper. Tony the Tiger, the cereal's previous face, must have been unavailable.

 Quite apart from the fact that the sugar coated cereal is never likely to taste great , the clip seemed to trigger all the things that annoy us about adverts- repetition, naff songs, bright colours, singing kids and a sense of occasion about something mundane. Perhaps we shouldn't have expected more from a company who relied for decades as a mascot on an animated tiger with a Bowie- like ability to change with the zeitgeist but even so inflicting such an irritating ad was hardly going to endear us to the product was is?

What it did do however was mobilise thousands of internet users into debate and unfortunately for the kid he took the brunt of a wave of hatred as if he actually wrote it or something. Amongst the comments made about the ad were that the kid’s voice “operates on a frequency which toys with people’s bowels”, “I’d nominate the kid for an ASBO”, “the kid wants a bullet, the cheesy f****, but it’s the tune that stays in the brain for days” and the rather ridiculous “I used to like Frosties adverts but this one was really annoying”. Frosties Kid did have his supporters though; one person on Yahoo (!) defended him because “he had the courage to go in front of the whole world”, while another says “he did a very good job and with much enthusiasm” while one person claimed it was her favourite advert in the world ever!!

The ad itself also became the inspiration for several urban myths. That the kid had committed suicide after being bullied over the ad, that he wasn't a real kid at all but a CGI creation. Yet another story is that he was seriously ill and was given the ad as a last request (who would seriously want their last achievement to be a Frosties ad?!!) so when he rises above the crowd at the end it is symbolic of him rising to Heaven!!

Some of the debate spread wider, such as posing the question “who eats Frosties on a plate?” in reference to one of the lines. The missing in action Tony the Tiger was was not immune to the flak with one wag having spent about three seconds coming up with the alternative line “It’s gonna be great, smashing Tony over the head with a plate”. Perhaps the choice comment on YouTube said “I think his voice is weird but the song gets in my head”. YouTube contained a surprisingly large number of spoofs (one of which is slagged off for using cornflakes instead of Frosties), a subliminal message version and even a remix. Kelloggs' official and probably slightly bemused response to the furore was to say the ad is popular, the boy lives in South Africa (perhaps under the advert protection programme?) and is fine.

Sven Ruygrok, recent publicity photo. 

Whatever, the kid became an urban myth and in 2016, a decade afterwards the website vice.com tracked the actor down to get his take on things. Sven Ruygrok  is his name and when he spoke to the site he was by then twenty four. The big takeaway from the chat is that it's not even him singing on the advert.  He is simply miming to an already recorded track so the owner of that nasal voice has still to be identified but its not the kid! Sven seems to have taken all the vitriol in his stride and when he did the interview, as well as an acting career in South Africa he also ran anti bullying workshops which considering he was one of the earliest targets of mass online bullying is interesting. Oh and he never ate Frosties either.

(This post was originally published in This Way Up fanzine in 2006 and has been updated especially afer my first (and last) ever Frosties experience)