Perhaps my geekiest guilty pleasure is an interest in television idents. Many a lonely Friday evening has been spent perusing such websites as TV Ark and The TV Room. Not because I’m a sad loner, you understand, but because it’s the really cool thing to do these days.
I also love cereals. The most functional cereal of them all is Weetabix. It’s the only way to go if you have a particularly challenging day ahead. There is nothing in the world that three Weetabix can’t solve. Except perhaps indigestion.
So an advertising campaign that combines the might of Weetabix with the quaint kitsch of classic television idents cannot be anything but awesome. I don’t watch much television these days, so I guess there is the chance that everyone in the world apart from me already knew about it and this post is a bit like going, “ALL BECAUSE THE LADY LOVES MILK TRAY! LOL!”
The only way I learned about the Weetabix advertising campaign was from a post at Idents.tv. I had seen one of the adverts before out of the corner of my eye, probably when I was fast forwarding through the adverts during a grand prix. It didn’t occur to me that it was supposed to mimic idents, with their trippy ambient music and strange abstract visuals.
The TV theme is continued at the Weetabix.tv website, where all of the ident-adverts are available to view. A lot of them have clearly been inspired by classic BBC Two idents from the 1990s.
We have all seen idents thousands of times. Yet, they are forgotten by many and treated as though they are merely wallpaper at best and an annoyance at worst. Yet, idents are the most familiar sight on television; a reminder that all is right in the world. They are beautiful pieces of design that are almost always better than the programme that follows them. So it’s great to see idents being recognised by Weetabix in their advertising campaign.


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