Professional Documents
Culture Documents
When the respondents showed up, they were a little anxious about
being deprived of the household staple. One man relayed his
experience of coming downstairs to the kitchen in the morning
before work, pouring out his cereal, slicing bananas on top of it, and
then remembering his promise of abstinence. An ethical dilemma
arose, the man later admitted to Steel. Would he use milk and
simply lie to the rest of focus group? Or would he throw out the
cereal? Worse yet, would he eat the cereal without milk?
The origin of the Got Milk? slogan is almost comically banal. After
Jon Steel relayed the results from the focus group to his partners
Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, they held a meeting to plan next
steps. A colleague, Tara Winkler, asked Goodby what he’d like to
call that part of the meeting.
“I don’t know, it’s about running out of milk,” Goodby recalls saying.
“Why don’t we call it ‘Got milk?’—with the question mark.”
But wait . . . the tagline! As Goodby says, “The lesson is, sometimes,
if you listen to the world around you, it tells you what to do, you
know?”
The first fruits of the Got Milk? project arrived in 1993, with “Aaron
Burr,” which has become an ad-world cultural touchstone the way
Michal Jordan’s 1998 foul-line slam-dunk versus Dominique Wilkins
has become sports legend: bold, original, never before attempted,
and never successfully remastered.
“There was a big fight in the agency at the time between the other
creatives and me and Goodby,” Silverstein recalls. “They said, ‘You
old farts, you can’t say ‘Got Milk?’ at the end!’ And we said, ‘No, no,
you have to say it!’
The creatives talk about how these ads flipped the script of what
advertising at the time was capable of relaying. They have a dark
mood that hurls the viewer face-first into stories that don’t explicitly
reveal the product being sold until the final seconds, suggesting that
the story we tell ourselves about milk is more important than milk
itself.
After the first round of commercials, Manning pushed to get the Milk
Processing Board to license the slogan to food brands like Oreo and
Cheerios free of charge. “Why don’t we work with these food
companies?” Manning remembers telling the board. “The dairy
industry would never do that because milk was on a ‘good for you’
strategy at that time. Well, if they’re on this strategy, you don’t work
with Oreos. We did. Nabisco eventually marketed a Got Milk? Oreo,
where Got Milk? was embossed on a cookie.” Girl Scout cookies
were next, followed by a massive brand of an entirely different order.
“Mattel, who manufactured Barbies, got on board. Think about that.
Mattel manufacturing millions of Barbies . . . for us!”
Former Bozell creatives Sal Taibi and Bernie Hogya, who worked on
the campaign (and later published two books on it), were
instrumental in wrangling the celebrities who appeared in the ads.
Among the A-list gets: Harrison Ford, Britney Spears, Kate Moss,
Dennis Rodman (photographed nude), Kristi Yamaguchi, Patrick
Ewing, Joan Rivers, Hanson, The Simpsons, and Kermit the Frog.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, at peak Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame,
posed as her demon-dusting alter ego. “To follow in the footsteps of
so many legends was truly an honor,” she says via email. “It really
started a national conversation about drinking milk, something I don’t
believe people gave much thought to, other than for coffee and
dunking cookies.”
Annie Leibovitz photographed more than 180 of the ads. Back then,
when magazine ad spending peaked at 9.4% of all U.S. advertising
dollars (compared to 6.5% in 2015), and one ad might appear in a
dozen different magazines the same month, the photographer
sensed how huge the campaign’s reach could be. “Annie sent a note
back to us saying that not only did she want to do it, but she wanted
to make sure nobody else could,” says Hogya, then Bozell’s art
director. “She saw the power of what this was going to be. At a time
when print magazines were very big, she thought that if she were to
make the photos really special, they would be everywhere. You
couldn’t get away from this campaign.” Leibovitz’s then-partner,
Susan Sontag, tagged along one day just so she could meet Kermit.
The same day Kermit was photographed, WWF wrestler Stone Cold
Steve Austin arrived for his shoot with Leibovitz feeling uncomfortable
that he wasn’t in prime physical shape. “I was standing there and
something wasn’t quite right, and she didn’t like what she was
seeing,” he says. “She handed me another glass of milk and made me
hold them at waist level. She made me look 10 times better than I did
before, because what she did was completely block out my waist, my
love handles. She made me look like a Greek god.” Hogya has a
slightly different memory: “I think the idea back then was to play off
the image of crushing two beer cans,” he says with a laugh. “But
maybe Steve’s right.”
There was no shortage of celebrities willing to participate in the
campaign, but there was one small catch: All subjects had to be milk
drinkers. Taibi, who was director of client services at Bozell, explains
that MilkPEP was only paying $25,000 per ad, a fraction of what these
stars normally charged for commercials. (Most donated the fee to
charity.) So if money was not the motivating factor for participation,
the concept had to be. And this took people like Whoopi Goldberg,
who is lactose intolerant, out of the running. “I really wanted to do it,
but I was told you had to be a milk drinker, so I couldn’t do it the first
time around,” she says. But when the milk producers planned an ad
for lactose-free milk, the comedian was the first person they called.
And yet, statistical data indicates that the Milk Mustache campaign
didn’t influence long-term behavior. According to a report by
CoBank, over a 30-year period from 1970-2010, milk consumption
has declined nationally from 28.6 gallons to 20.9 gallons. Even in
California, where the dairy industry is a multibillion-dollar business,
milk sales are dwindling. There are many reasons for this—
competition from non-dairy alternatives and healthier lifestyle
choices chief among them—but it also suggests that the tagline
became more memorable than effective. When asked if this is the
case, the Got Milk? execs seem to agree, albeit without admitting
that the campaign failed to sell more milk. Manning, for instance, is
adamant that Got Milk? was representative of a perfect time and
place, now long gone. “That milk [consumption] continues to go
down is not a fundamental problem with marketing,” he says. “It’s a
change in how America eats and drinks. White milk just doesn’t play
the role it used to play.”
In 2014, MilkPEP retired “Got Milk?” and replaced it with its current
tagline, “Milk Life.” Gone are the milk-mustachioed celebrities,
replaced with Olympians’ mothers, who narrate memories of their
children’s work ethic. “I think that celebrities started taking on a
different meaning for Americans,” says Julia Kadison, the current
CEO of MilkPEP. “We heard from our focus groups, that, well, any
celebrity is going to shill for a product. The other thing that was
happening is people were so focused on the next milk mustache
celebrity that they weren’t taking away the message of the ad. We
needed to shake things up.”
“Milk Life” might never enter the zeitgeist the way its predecessor
did. In this age of fleeting virality, few things do. But those two words
live on, emblematic of a time that in retrospect seems simpler.
Got nostalgia?