Grrrrreat! New ads (cereal and soup!) and first Amsterdammers

I never thought I’d see the day when we’d be doing business with cereal companies.

Whiskey, cheese, amusement parks, corndogs, condoms, flights to the moon, funky shoes, utopias one and all. Anything but cereal.

But what do you know, we’ve gotten ads from Kelloggs and General Mills this week.

And, glory be, they are smart ads.

Best of all, they come from inside giant ad agencies. While stuffed with smart people, big organizations often have trouble coping with the cut and thrust of the blogosphere. Institututions tend to uniformly generate a talk-at/down baked-three-month-ago-ness in their online advertising, and miss any sense of joy or horizontal effervescent chatteriness of the blogosphere. Not so Kelloggs and GM.

The Kellogg’s ads, created by Starcom IP in Chicago, tap into the blogosphere’s t-shirt and retro fascination.

And the General Mills ads, produced by Asabailey on behalf of Saatchi & Saatchi, are for a soap opera hosted by Progresso soup.

Both include strong images and lots of links. As Tony the Tiger would say, grrrrreat!

While I’m posting, I should note that James Joyner. was the first to fly out in the BloggersinAmsterdam project, followed by Heather and Jon Armstrong. Several bloggers have asked for suggestions from their readers and have gotten numerous great replies. Links are in this post.