The campaign will be live from July 18 to August 15, running across print and digital 96 and 48 sheets in London, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. Around 180+ billboards have been placed in these key cities. In other money-saving news, we've built our new office out of papier mache, and we now pay our staff with coins made out of tin foil. They are aware of the need to grab the curiosity of their audience without losing their attention, a useful tactic to apply when gaining familiarity in a market. Sugar-free, protein-rich cereal that’s suitable for vegans (and everyone else) of all ages! Surreal is a gamechanger brand making plant milky waves in the breakfast industry.

A great lesson to takeaway from this case study is how Surreal’s intentionality in their brand messaging served as a strategic catalyst into their market. What lessons from this do you think you can apply to your startup?Eaten straight out of the box, sprinkled over a chocolate sundae, crumbled over vegan cheesecake or doused in plant milk and slurped up with a spoon, there are endless ways to enjoy cereal! Since their launch earlier this year, they’ve steadily been growing and gaining recognition as the new, disruptive cereal brand in the market. But how?

See some of Surreal’s billboards and copy, creatively deploying these 4 big names in advertising their product. London design studio Onwards has crafted the “off-beat” branding for adult-orientated cereal brand, Surreal. How do new brands make their mark in established and concentrated markets? As a startup, going up against larger-than-life household names can often be perceived as a losing battle, deterring a business from executing an idea to its fullest. But, there are the occasional instances where new brands have not only been able to break through, but actually stand their ground against competitive giants. And Surreal cereal is doing just that. You need to be as friendly as a dog, have the street smarts of a cat, and if you can turn your head 180 degrees like an owl that’d be pretty cool. Let’s face it, a bowl of seedy muesli might be healthier, but it just can’t satisfy taste cravings in the same way.

Once we've ousted plates, we'll then fight those forkers in the cutlery industry (long live spoons), before completing the treble by fighting an international quiche conglomerate.

Amongst the mundanity of our daily lives, we all need a bit of playful cereal to start the day; now we can enjoy a big bowl for breakfast without the accompanying guilt. From its high-quality vegan ingredients to its rich protein content, Surreal cereal gets a big thumbs up from us 👍🏻 That depends on your perspective. If you’re comparing it to the cheap crap that sells on supermarket shelves, then it is a little on the pricey side. However, if you’re prioritising convenient nutrition at breakfast, then Surreal is value for money, particularly when you opt for their subscription service. The finance team said we’d been spending too much money, so to shut them up we made the world’s most budget billboard. We couldn’t afford one of those special, flashy, custom billboards, so we decided to save some pennies and make our own billboard from scratch. Additionally, Surreal isn’t afraid to be disruptive. With a lot of their campaigns referencing big-name breakfast cereals with high sugar content, taking aim at the likes of Frosties on billboards around London. A less conventional strategy like this one feeds into their left-field approach but also increases visibility from established audiences.

Surreal contains 240g of cereal in a bag. That means, if you follow conventional cereal portion sizes (32g), you can squeeze 7-8 portions out of the box. Lucy and I love a large breakfast, so we found that 60g was the perfect amount for us. So the exclusion of animal products instantly makes Surreal a more eco-friendly option than the majority of traditional cereals. An official statement also mentioned how Kellogg’s recently lost a court case challenging the government’s new HFSS guidelines around the sugar content of its cereals. Traditional cereals are made of sugar and grains, with very little nutritional value; they have you sniffing out your next sugar hit before you’ve even reached 11am.