YMMV / General Mills

• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • The Satur-Yay-Aaah!! (no, that's not a typo) commercials from General Mills in 2016. They starred the Trix Rabbit, Chip the Wolf, Sonny the Cocoa Puffs Bird, a talking orange voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, a kid voiced by Jeremy Shada (a.k.f. Finn the Human), and the obscure Honey the Honey Drop, who hasn't been in a commercial since The '80s. The commercials feature, among other things, an extremely sporadic and out-of-place Wreck-It Ralph reference, and artstyles, sets and language that are clearly trying to emulate Regular Show and Adventure Time, but in the end, resemble Breadwinners more than anything. These portrayals were dropped after audiences swiftly rejected them, and they haven't appeared since the initial campaign.
  • Speaking of cereal commercials trying to emulate animated productions of the 2010s, Lucky Charms redesigned their ads in 2016 to resemble the squishy colorful style of shows like Adventure Time and Uncle Grandpa, where Lucky appears more childlike (without his Gaelic accent) and has parties with the anthropomorphized charms. One commercial had them sing the "hearts, stars, and horseshoes..." theme song as a half-hearted rap. The change went over about as well as the "Satur-Yay-Aaaah" ad, so later ads featured a Lucky more reminiscent of the older design, with his old accent back.