What would have happened if little Gracie Colbert (no known relation to this article’s author) hadn’t blown away the casting team looking for a lead in a cereal commercial?
The spot’s objective was to sell a product. What ended up happening is it changed advertising, media, pop culture and society as a whole.
In 2013 the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi came up with “Just Checking,” a 30-second spot touting the heart health benefits of the General Mills cereal brand, Cheerios. The premise was a young child, after conferring with her mother, adorably misunderstood how Cheerios was good for the heart and poured the cereal over her father sleeping in another room. Cute spot. Not too much dialogue, not a lot of action. But wow, did it get a lot attention.
It wasn’t the message or the product that was causing the stir. It was the fact that the mother in the ad was white and the father was Black. The little girl was biracial. And well, that was enough to spark such venomous outrage that General Mills disabled comments on the YouTube upload after just a couple of days. Not all the comments were negative — according to a statement at the time from General Mills the comments in support of the ad outnumbered the negative comments 10-to-1 — but the vitriol highlighted the racial strife of a country that had just reelected its first Black president who just so happened to be the product of an interracial relationship.
To the credit of General Mills and the Cheerios brand team, they didn’t shy away from the controversy, they doubled down. During the Super Bowl of 2014, Cheerios released a sequel to “Just Checking”: “Gracie.” They named the spot after the star of the campaign — Gracie (who now goes by Grace) Colbert.
And just like that everything changed.
The data isn’t fully available, but the anecdotal evidence is easy to see. More and more advertisers are casting multiethnic actors and interracial couple portrayals to sell their products. And American consumers are overwhelmingly supportive. According to Pew Research, both the rate and acceptance of interracial relationships are on the rise. In 2019 Pew found that 1 in 5 of all newlyweds were interracial. And in 2021 a Gallup poll found that Americans’ acceptance of interracial relationships was at an all-time high of 94%. It is not irony that Gallup previously polled Americans on the question in June of 2013 – just a couple weeks after the “Just Checking” Cheerios ad ran.
While shows such as “Mixed-ish” and “Dear White People” are putting the subject interracial dating — particularly Black and white relationships — front and center, it wasn’t until nearly two years after the Cheerios ads ran that well-established “The Walking Dead” romantically intertwined the storyline of two of its main characters, Rick (who is white) and Michonne (who is Black). Unlike the aforementioned television shows, what also set the Cheerios ad apart is the casting of the father of Gracie as Black and the mother as white. While that is the more common of Black/white interracial relationships, media portrayals often do not accurately portray the predominant dynamic of Black/white interracial relationships. But it’s a far cry from where we were before the 2013 Cheerios ad.
And again, we wouldn’t be here if Colbert didn’t nail her audition.
Doug Martin
“This wasn’t storyboarded as a multiracial family,” said Doug Martin, chief brand officer for General Mills and in 2013 associate director of Cheerios brand marketing. “With kids, the most important thing is getting the right actor, and this girl (Colbert) just blew everyone away, so we chose the kid first. With kids, sometimes you get a kid that’s one way off camera and on camera you get something totally different, so getting the right kid is key. And Gracie, she’s biracial, so then we went about casting adult actors that would be a match for her.”
It was that match that changed advertising and culture over the past 10 years.
While the Cheerios ad changed popular culture, that may not have been the intent.
“The commercial is cute. It’s about love, but I shy away from thinking about a commercial being about social change,” said David Todd Lawrence, associate professor of American Culture and Difference, Diversity Leadership and English at the University of St. Thomas. “Bottom line is they’re (General Mills) a company trying to sell something. But I recognize the importance of representation in media and on television. And the spot reinforces the normalcy of the world we live in.”
The shift in representation has as much to do with societal issues as it does with the Cheerios ads, according to Lawrence.
“I think it has as much to do with (the killing of) Trevon Martin, Ferguson (uprising) — all the way up to (the murder of) George Floyd,” Lawrence said. “I think a commercial like that hitting at the right time with all of the things happening in the world all kind of went hand-in-hand.”
And again, we’re not here without that great audition from a 6-year-old.
Supplied David Todd Lawrence: “Bottom line is they’re (General Mills) a company trying to sell something. But I recognize the importance of representation in media and on television. And the spot reinforces the normalcy of the world we live in.”
“I remember that audition. I was very comfortable with the script, and after the audition I said, ‘Yeah, I got this,’” said Colbert, now 17 and in the middle of studying for high school finals.
Colbert said it wasn’t until years later that she became aware of the controversy surrounding the ads.
“I was shocked when I was told about the backlash. For me it was so normal. I was used to seeing my white mother and Black father,” Colbert said. “Now, understanding racism, the backlash isn’t that strange.”
Yes, Cheerios was out to sell a product, but Martin realized the spots were more than boxes off the shelves. Martin described the groundbreaking ads as “probably one of the most rewarding moments in my advertising career.”
Reflectively, Colbert, after learning the spots weren’t written for a multiracial family, asked “what if?”
“Knowing they (General Mills and the ad team) changed the roles based on me makes me wonder how things would be if I didn’t get the role,” said Colbert. “It feels good that I was a part of change. I would say it’s an honor.”