And so, the gift-giver was portrayed as undertaking dangerous James Bond-style stunts on fabulously treacherous journeys through remote places to even reach the woman he had set out to give them to. It was all an obvious joke, but one that played into people's sense of romance.

Individually wrapped for freshness, Fox’s Chewy Mints have been developed to fill a gap in the market, as while the gums and chews market grew by 12% vs last year and mint flavoured confectionery saw 5.8% growth vs last year, there still remained limited choice for consumers looking for mint flavour in a chewable, individually wrapped format. The introduction of the Weetabix characters in the mid-1980s transformed the fortunes of the British breakfast cereal Weetabix. Each of them took the form of a Weetabix biscuit dressed in clothes and given a face and individual personality. They operated together as an animated street gang with youthful attitude and a sense of ‘cool’ governing their style and mannerisms. This was reflected in the 'Thank you very much!' TV advertising campaign of the 1980s, which depicted in song a variety of scenarios in which people could thank each other by giving each other boxes of Roses chocolates. Although it was complete nonsense on a rational level, the emotional messaging worked, and the absurdist humour did not stop the campaign from being a long-running success. After a pause starting in 2003, the campaign was revived in 2016, perhaps out of a sense of nostalgia, or in recognition that the market for Milk Tray today is predominantly an older one that remembers the earlier advertisements.

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The marketing of Shredded Wheat also underwent a phase of renewal in the early 1990s. In this famous campaign, the late Brian Clough (1935-2004), former England international footballer and long-time manager of the club Nottingham Forest, was portrayed requiring all his footballers to eat Shredded Wheat.

Launched in 1968 when the James Bond film franchise was in its early prime, the Milk Tray Man (originally played by Australian model Gary Myers, born 1941, who continued in the role until 1984), was a character introduced by Cadbury as a thinly-disguised pastiche of the well-known action hero. Whereas Bond would risk his life on adventurous missions in the employment of the British Secret Service, Milk Tray Man had a laughably pedestrian mission by comparison: to deliver a box of Milk Tray Chocolates to a woman who loved them.

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In places, the rhyming imagery is blended into the song as though in apparent descriptive reference to the experience of eating the cereal, notably the line 'Snow drops... chocolate flavour!' which evokes the milk being poured onto a bowl of the cereal resembling snowfall. Bixie’s habit of exclaiming ‘Yeah!’ reflected the popular informal lingo for ‘Yes’ of the 1980s. Nowadays, the more muted ‘Yeh’ is more commonly heard. Finally, the punchline arrives: 'But nothing tops Kellogg's Coco Pops' - the messaging being that however much fun all the other things mentioned may be, they are not as pleasurable as the experience of eating Coco Pops. As a means of enthusing children with a song whose addictive qualities resembled those of the cereal itself, the campaign was highly effective.