By Bruce Morrow
Before they started making Cap’n Crunch’s CrunchBerries®, cold cereal had no actual taste. In fact, during the Cold War, there was general agreement among my friends, many of whom were junior conspiracy theorists to begin with, that what they gave us as “the anchor to a nutritious breakfast” wasn’t actually a food at all.

It was some kind of paper product that government scientists had invented to beat the Reds. You could either eat it or move to Russia.

When the liberals took over the country in the ’60s, the cereal manufacturers attempted to foil the socialist food bureaucracy by making really sugary cereals,so kids would hound their mothers until the poor women couldn’t stand it any more and gave in to their demand for what amounted to atomic-powered sugar bombs.In this new consumer landscape, no kid wanted a cereal without the word “frosted” on the box.This resulted in a“Cold Cereal War” during which the distributors of the traditional,tasteless cereals had to find a new weapon to counter. It was kind of a grain-fed arms race.

They chose toys. The makers of Corn Flakes started including something to play with to make their drab offering more attractive. My favorite was the plastic “Frog Man Diver,” which would sink to the bottom of the tub and occasionally, but certainly not reliably, bob to the surface. This particular toy made for a long bath without a guaranteed payoff, which in itself was kind of exciting for a small town kid who wasn’t allowed to watch TV on school nights.

Only Shredded Wheat stayed above the fray, perhaps because the people at Post figured that anybody who would actually eat Shredded Wheat was a born ascetic and probably had never played a day in his life.

Of course, these were toys that toddlers could choke on, but apparently toddlers didn’t choke back then. So we got whistles and decoder rings and “3-D Statuettes,” all with small parts that could come off and lodge in our throats. But, this was the Baby Boom, and the government wasn’t all that concerned, because there were plenty of extra children to go around.

Which was good, because this was also the era of “Lawn Darts.”

Back then, mothers smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails during pregnancy, and most were willing to take their chances with small plastic parts in exchange for a little peace and quiet. My own mother confided to me late in life, “Honey, I drank so many martinis when I was pregnant with you, it’s a miracle you weren’t born with an olive for a nose.” I was the middle child, of course.

And while expectant mothers generally eschew alcohol, tobacco and firearms during pregnancy these days(except on the hit television show “Cops”), things haven’t really changed all that much. It’s still the toys that get the attention.

In our business these toys take the form of high-priced technology marvels like virtual events, digital meetings, touch-screen experiences and high definition in the third dimension. And they’re intended to attract wide-eyed grown ups to dry business-to-business content, not children to dusty oaten alphabet shapes.

Take one look at your e-mail and you’ll find promotional blasts for webinars on virtual trade shows and hybrid events, social media as the new marketing silver bullet, and interactive sales materials as an effective complement to (or even replacement for) “face-to-face” experiences. Good lord, wasn’t face-to-face marketing all the rage, I don’t know, yesterday?

Please don’t think me an old curmudgeon. Instead, try to picture me as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who has your best interest at heart. The toys are fine, but only if the kids go on to eat their cereal and it’s got real nutrition in it. 

Oh, wait, Dr. C. Everett Koop is an old curmudgeon. 

But in this case, he’s right to be! And he would want me to ask three questions about the toys we put in our marketing mix and what our audiences do with them:

1. If, like most kids, they dig elbow-deep into the box to get the toy while leaving their bowl three-quarters full, is the toy worth the money we spent on it? 
2. If all they eat is a sugared-up, milked-down version of our real marketing message, isn’t our short-term gain achieved at the sacrifice of our long-term marketing health? 
3. If, as leaders of our companies, we’re even tacitly encouraging our weary marketers to sacrifice content for some peace and quiet from the constant shouting for the most “innovative” new thing, aren’t we taking a potentially dangerous shortcut?

What we really need to do as mature marketing moms and dads is to let our business outcomes, not the whining child in the grocery cart, drive our decisions about how to market. And then we can use the shiny toys to promote great content, not just the toys themselves.That’s the way it’s supposed to work. That’s the grown-up way.

Ask Dr. Koop, who, thanks to a button he wears around his neck, can live alone without being alone. Now that’s the kind of technology you can sink your teeth into!