As we head toward the final quarter of 2023, it’s worth noting that one of the most ambitious sports trading card promotions had just come to an end 60 years ago.
Post Cereal’s decision to use baseball cards—and at least for one year, football cards–to hook kids on the brand had turned into a three-year campaign that wrapped up in the summer of ‘63.
It wasn’t just a cereal thing, though. Parent company General Mills included Jell-O gelatin and pie filling in the promotion, too, putting single cards on the back of boxes in 1962 and ’63, but the promotion was generally concentrated in the Midwest.
After a 1960 gambit that put big, colorful pictures of as handful of athletes on the backs of its Grape Nuts packages, the company went all in from 1961-63, designing its own comprehensive sets of cards meant to be collected by kids who really had to work to complete them.
The amount of money General Foods committed to the program had to have been staggering. There were TV ads, a big spread in LIFE Magazine that gave us pullout cards of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and big store displays.
Across the country, local food stores were ready and willing to include the mention of the cards in their weekly ads.
A search through various newspapers at the time reveals a few articles that referred to the promotion, indicating the General Foods publicity team did its part, too.
A few interesting nuggets from brief editorial mentions and advertising in those old papers.
*Post had acquired the rights to produce cards of 500 players but trimmed the list down to a yearly checklist of 200 that made up both the annual baseball sets from 1961-1963 and the 1962 football set.
*Each box of Post Cereal held multiple cards on the back that were meant to be cut out but calculated individually, Post says it produced 400 million baseball cards in 1961, 800 million in 1962 and 600 million football cards in the fall of 1962.
*The football card promotion began in October, several weeks after the baseball cards stopped appearing on the backs of cereal boxes.
*In addition to its memorable ad in LIFE in April of ’62, Post had spread in some Sunday magazine type publications for its baseball cards that even included a checklist printed in the ad. This one was printed in a Vancouver, BC newspaper.
*Whitey Ford was used to promote the 1963 Jell-O cards, with an artist rendering of the Yankees ace pitching the one per box set that kept kids busy asking mom to make it as often as possible so they could collect the cards.
*General Foods put the Jell-O card on the backs of all boxes of its gelatin and pudding and pie filling except for Choco Mint.
The promotion had run its course as summer came to an end but Kellogg’s would revive the cereal/baseball card tie just seven years later, filling a breakfast void that kept kids looking at cereal boxes throughout the springs and summers for 14 more years.
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