Years ago, kids would do back flips over a hockey card in a box of cereal. Now it takes more than a Tony Fernandez rookie card to get the youngsters’ juices flowing.

These days nothing short of a CD-ROM will grab the attention of shoppers and their apathetic offspring. The stakes have been raised even further with Kellogg’s new preview game of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, this summer’s highly anticipated Disney animated movie, peeping out of cereal boxes. Because, let’s face it, if a cereal isn’t attached to a major motion picture, sales are probably reserved for the geriatric ‘prunes-and-bran’ crowd, anyway.

Kellogg and Disney Interactive offer a cutting edge promo that features an in-pack CD-ROM game, and also includes on-pack offers for free Atlantis water toys and a contest to win one of four $25,000 cash prizes.

There is precedent here, of course. General Mills and Hasbro Toys have teamed up in the past, for example, to offer consumers the opportunity to collect CD-ROM versions of games such as Monopoly, much to the delight of families who enjoy value-added grocery shopping.

The CD-ROM game Search for the Journal is available in Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Corn Pops, and Pop-Tarts. The Atlantis game can be played individually or as a multi-player game over the Internet. The retail value of similar Disney Interactive games is $20 to $30 CDN.

According to Jacki Nelson, senior manager of corporate communications at Kellogg, ‘The program was designed to appeal to consumers on different levels, the tech side with the CD-ROM, the premium/collector side with the mail-in offer for toys, and the contest side with the decoder cash-prize game.’

Kellogg support includes unique P-O-P elements, including large, 3-D underwater themed displays in store. The Atlantis water toys, which are available when you send in two UPC codes, represent characters from the movie: Ulysses, Leviathan, Martag and the gang. Apparently, when fresh baking powder is added to the toys, they dive through the water, resurface, and then journey back to the bottom, begging the obvious question: ‘what if you add crystal meth to them?’

On top of the aforementioned prizes and giveaways, there is also an on-box game dealing with an ‘Atlantian’ alphabet that entices people to decode a secret message inside the box for a chance to win $25,000. ‘The Atlantian language will appeal to kids because it is fun and challenging, but parents will support the ‘edutainment’ aspect as well,’ says Nelson. Not to mention $25,000 goes a long way towards a kid’s college funds or dry cleaning bills.

As to how success will be measured, Nelson says, ‘support and endorsement from retail is usually a strong indicator of success. Our retailers bought into Atlantis immediately. Once the program is in store and we start getting supportive calls to our consumer pulse centre, then we know it is a success.’