"I'm a little lad who loves berries and cream."
Candy ads are wallpaper — pleasant, tasteful, instantly forgotten. To launch a strange new flavour (berries and cream?), being persuasive isn't the goal; being impossible to forget is. A weird flavour earns a weird ad.
A Victorian "little lad" in a frock coat and bowl cut appears at a bus stop and, the instant the flavour is mentioned, erupts into a manic, ritualistic song-and-dance: "Berries and cream, berries and cream, I'm a little lad who loves berries and cream." No logic. No explanation. No wink. Just pure dream-logic that burrows into your skull and refuses to leave.
Two things are engineered underneath the madness: an earworm (the chant) and a character so bizarre it demands a rewatch to check you saw it right. It baffled people in 2007 — and that's exactly why it didn't die. In 2021, a TikTok creator resurfaced the song and it detonated: 350M+ views, endless duets, and the Little Lad's own account past two million followers. The weirdness was the shelf life.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: answer a candy brief with an unhinged pilgrim-child chanting nonsense at strangers, and never once explain the joke.
Smart: a chant-you-can't-shake plus a character-you-can't-explain is unforgettable in a category built on the forgettable. The strangeness is the memory hook — and 14 years later it proved it.
It had the nerve to be genuinely, unresolved-ly weird — no explanation, no apology. That's precisely why it outlived every "tasteful" candy ad ever made, and came back from the dead a decade later.
Client: Starburst (Wrigley / Mars)
Agency: TBWA\Chiat\Day
ECD: Gerry Graf · CDs: Ian Reichenthal & Scott Vitrone
Director: Randy Krallman (Smuggler) · The Little Lad: Jack Ferver
Sources: Adweek · Marketing Dive · Communication Arts
← The Banger Blog