Surreal didn’t have the budget to pay Serena Williams. So it did something better: it found another Serena Williams.
The British cereal brand tracked down ordinary people who shared names with global superstars and paid them around 250 dollars to give their honest opinion about the product. The real Serena turned out to be a student in London. The real Michael Jordan, a neighbor from St. Albans. Dwayne Johnson drove a bus, and Ronaldo was simply a guy lucky enough to have that name.
The cleverest part was not the idea but the honesty. Each billboard included fine print confessing everything, like the one that read, “Serena Williams eats our cereal”, followed by a clarification below: “She’s a student from London and we paid her to eat it, but the point still stands”. Some feared lawsuits from the lawyers of the real celebrities. None were filed. And a campaign without a multimillion-dollar budget ended up speaking louder than any sponsorship deal.
