In October of 1993, the California Milk Processor Board, with the help of the advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, launched a TV ad called “Aaron Burr,” about a history buff who couldn’t enunciate the answer to a trivia question because he had just eaten peanut butter and didn’t have a glass of milk to wash it down. It was the first of many Got Milk? advertisements, which most often featured celebrities with milk mustaches. Two years later, the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), the national promotion arm of milk processors like Dean Foods and HP Hood, licensed Got Milk? and distributed it nationwide. By the mid-nineties, ninety-one per cent of adults surveyed in the U.S. were familiar with the campaign.
Mattel made a special-edition Got Milk? Barbie in 1995 and a Hot Wheels Got Milk? dairy-delivery truck in 1998. The Got Milk? parodies have been so numerous—Got Jesus? Got Beer? Got Lube?—that the California Milk Processor Board made a poster of them in 2005 and offered it for free download. (The board didn’t think as highly of PETA’s parody, “Got Pus? Milk Does,” and threatened to sue the animal-rights organization for a trademark violation.) My favorite is the one I often see on the bumpers of pickup trucks in Vermont, where I live: Gut Deer?
But there has been a problem: Got Milk? didn’t actually get people to buy more milk. The daily consumption of fluid milk—as opposed to milk-based products like cheese, yogurt, and butter—has steadily declined from 0.96 cups per person in 1970 to 0.59 cups in 2011. There are lots of reasons for this. People have more drink options than ever: sodas, juices, waters, non-dairy milks, energy drinks. Milk prices have risen. Sales of cold cereal, which people often eat with milk, have fallen as people turn to quicker options like breakfast bars and Greek yogurt. Even the rebounding economy has played a part in recent years. When people eat out more often, it turns out that they drink less milk. Last year, things got particularly bad. “It was a call to attention,” Mark Stephenson, the director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Profitability, told me.
As of Monday, the Got Milk? campaign is pretty much dead. While California will still use it, MilkPEP has replaced the national campaign, somewhat unceremoniously, with Milk Life, made by the advertising agency Lowe Campbell Ewald. In the thirty-second TV spot for the new campaign, a boy and his mom chase a soccer ball, aided by milk propellers. A woman walking numerous large dogs deploys a milk parachute. A girl in a rock band windmills her guitar, à la Pete Townshend, and milk trails from her fingers in a dramatic arc. (Magically, none of these characters is drenched in the stuff that’s whirling around them.) Then, cue the tagline: “Start your day with the power of protein. Milk life.”
MilkPEP’s strategy is to shift from the whimsical Got Milk? campaign toward a more specific sales pitch based on milk’s protein content; half of all milk consumption happens in the morning, when people like to consume protein to “power through the day,” Julia Kadison, the interim C.E.O. of MilkPEP, told Advertising Age. She also said that protein is “really in the news and on consumer’s minds. But a lot of people don’t know that milk has protein, so it was very important to make that connection.” Or, as a statement on Lowe Campbell Ewald’s Web site puts it, Milk Life is trying “to show how starting your morning with milk can help power the potential of every day.”
The new direction sounds reasonable to Jessica Ziehm, the executive director of the New York Animal Agriculture Coalition, which advocates for dairy farms. Ziehm’s family milks six hundred head of cows on their farm in upstate New York. “People know milk and calcium go hand in hand,” she said. “People also need to know milk has a lot of protein.” I asked Ziehm what she thought of the new TV commercial. “It looks trendy,” she said, “and it’s too early to tell how it’s going to play with consumers, but anytime the processors increase sales, we increase sales.”
In a sense, Ziehm is right. Dairy farms sell their milk to processors, which then pasteurize, homogenize, and package it for sale to retail outlets. Processors and dairy farmers do have aligned interests—selling as much milk as possible. Up until about ten years ago, this meant that dairy farmers, through their own marketing organization Dairy Management Inc., helped pay for the Got Milk? campaign. But farmers stopped contributing because “they perceived that while Got Milk? was really visible, they didn’t believe it was moving the needle on milk,” Gary Wheelock, the C.E.O. of the New England Dairy Promotion Board, told me. Instead, farmers redoubled their efforts on research and development, along with corporate partnerships. One notable innovation that came out of that: round, resealable milk containers that, unlike square cartons, fit in car cup-holders. “It was only when corporations like McDonald’s started asking for this that processors made it available in plastic bottles,” Wheelock said.
More recently, that partnership has resulted in McDonald’s offering milk, chocolate milk, or juice instead of soda as the advertised beverage options in Happy Meals, as part of its effort to promote more healthful options. “A chain like McDonald’s is big enough that you can actually see the effect in the numbers when they do that,” Stephenson told me.
The impact of Got Milk? is harder to gauge, but dropping it for something new is still a big risk. Got Milk? has practically become a brand of its own. Can Milk Life even come close? If only we had a milk-powered time machine.
Kirk Kardashian is the author of “Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm,” published in 2012 by the University Press of New England.
Photograph by Christopher Badzioch/Getty.
