Special K advertising is getting into better shape

The new Special K television advertising from Kellogs shows that the cereal manufacturer is getting a little closer to its target market when it comes to its depiction of women's shape and size.

In previous campaigns the Special K woman was shaped like a catwalk model and spent most of her time in a revealing bikini that was cut so high on the leg it was heading for her armpit. The new Special K woman is a little heavier, definitely curvier and looks attractively motherly in a modern twentysomething way.

She wears shorts and a T-shirt and even her family are more real looking. Her very ordinary partner gets to answer that classic get-it-wrong-and-you're dead question: "Does my bum look big in this?"

There are three, 30-second adverts in the campaign. All have been made by international agency J. Walter Thompson. The brand is handled in Ireland by Irish agency McConnells. Two have been broadcast, a third will air late in the summer and whether they will be repeated next year depends on research into their acceptability to the target market.

Of Kellogs's 20 cereals, Special K is the sixth biggest brand in Ireland. Its core consumer is female and the cereal's 99 per cent fat free content makes it particularly appealing to weight watchers. Ireland is an attractive market for any breakfast cereal manufacturer.

In other markets, consumers have to be first persuaded of the wisdom of starting the day on a full stomach even before they are encouraged to choose a brand. In Ireland, 94 per cent of people sit down to breakfast, a figure considerably higher than in the British market. The average dress size in Ireland is 14 so it is easy to see how an advertising campaign which features more realistically shaped women will be more appealing to a female target market. However, food advertisers are traditionally nervous of explicitly linking themselves to even average-sized women.

The new Special K woman is nowhere near a curvy 14 and she is only slightly rounder than her predecessors. Even so, McConnells would not comment directly but would only say, in a carefully-worded press release, that the campaign "simply articulates, perhaps more pointedly what was said implicity before a prime issue of concern, namely getting and keeping in shape".

Two mainstream TV food advertisers feature overweight women, but in both cases the adverts are humorous. A dizzy blonde and her chubby friend have sold Philadelphia Cream Cheese in a campaign that has proved so popular it has lasted nearly six years and this year, Terrys, the chocolate manufacturer, used comedienne Dawn French in their Chocolate Orange campaign.

It is difficult to imagine that the advertiser would have been keen to have their chocolate endorsed by a non-celebrity of French's size no matter how funny the advert.