Watch Cheerios Celebrate Love in This Bold, Beautiful New Video

Cheerios’ latest video demonstrates how pure, simple storytelling can make the best kind of ad.

In a new three-minute video by Cheerios, André and Jonathan, a happy gay couple from Montreal, tells the heartwarming story of their journey to build a family. In the unwelcome climate, they thought they’d never have a child. “But we didn’t want to keep all this luck and love to ourselves. We wanted to share.”

But things changed. Their adopted daughter sits right in front of them toying with her bowl of Cheerios. She flashes a smile, and your heart melts. The video’s execution is simple, but incredibly effective. It has over 220,000 views on YouTube so far, and has garnered loads of positive press.

While dozens of commenters responded with vitriol to the ad, Cheerios learned last year to ignore the haters. When a commercial starring a biracial family caused a massive wave of backlash from bigoted commenters, many more rose up to praise the brand, culminating in a well-received Super Bowl ad starring the same family and a big win for Cheerios. Some brands likely would have retreated in the face of the backlash, but instead, Cheerios smartly stuck to their values of celebrating family, diversity, and love.

With this latest piece of storytelling, Cheerios is cementing themselves as a brand that stands for something, and that’s the most important factor in any content strategy.