Case Study – Historical

March 2nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment

Client: California Milk Processor Board (CMPB)

Ad Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Launch Date: 1993

What could you say about milk? It was white and came in gallons. People felt they knew all there was to know about it, so it was hard to find a strategic platform.
- Jeff Manning

Challenge:

Milk sales had been declining for the past 15 years while sales of pop were constantly rising. The California Milk Processor Board looked to Jeff Manning (Executive Director) to turn sales around. At first, their goal was not even to raise sales, but to just stop the steady decline. Manning said that they, “did believe that at least for certain portions of the population, we could flatten it out and start to move it up.”

Insight:

The California Milk Advisory Board had already been running ads featuring the slogan “Milk does the Body Good”, which focused on nutritional benefits and went along with the governments nutritional advice of having a glass of milk everyday. 70% of those surveyed claimed to drink milk regularly, and 88% of it was consumed at home. However, milk sales were still declining. “As Manning took over, consumers evidently still believed that milk was nutritious. ‘Ninety-three or -four percent of the people already said milk was good for you,’ Manning recalled. ‘And 90% said it had calcium, and a fair percentage said that calcium helped prevent osteoporosis. The problem was that the old ads didn’t change consumers’ behavior.’” Consumers already felt they knew all there is to know about it. The problem was milk is boring. White is boring, cardboard cartons are boring, even the label on the packaging is boring. Another problem “Our research indicated [was] that the only time anybody gave milk a second thought was when they didn’t have any,” Manning said. “Outdoor played a role of purchase, not consumption. We wanted to change their behavior, to make them think about buying milk before they ran out o f it.”

Approach:

Manning’s first big move that set this campaign apart was he decided to ditch the ‘milk is nutritious’ theme because everyone already knew that. “Although milk sales were declining, Manning’s research showed that 70% of Californians claimed to drink milk frequently. One rule of thumb in fast-moving packaged goods is that it’s easier to get current customers to consume more than it is to convert new users. Based on this logic, Manning and Goodby quickly agreed that their best hope of reviving sales was to prod this 70% to increase their consumption.” First they tried the idea of milk and ____. We drink milk with other things, like cereal or cookies, instead of by itself. They used focus groups and asked them how they feel when they eat something that typically goes with milk, but realize they don’t have milk in the house. They found people felt deprived. This led them to switch their focus from a positive relationship between milk and something that accompanies milk to the feeling of deprivation. “Working to distill this milk-deprived emotional state into a phrase that everyone might instantly understand, Goodby coined the campaign’s well-known grammatically-challenged tagline, ‘got milk?’ ”

for more vintage Got Milk? ads, here is an entire gallery… http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/got-milk-ads

Solution:

The launch of “Got Milk?” started off with 6 ads. One of these first ads, the Aaron Burr ad, became one of the most famous ads of the entire decade. They wanted you to relate to the feeling of having a mouthful of cookies or peanut butter or some sort of sticky treat, reaching for the milk, and seeing the milk is all gone. The campaign went on to include commercials, print ads, billboards, bus stops, “Got Milk?” merchandise, and on the doors in dairy isles. The slogan “got milk?” was licensed to the National Milk Processor Board (MilkPEP) in 1998 to use on their celebrity print ads. These famous ads pictured celebrities with milk moustaches and the slogan “Got Milk?” along with a personal reason why that celebrity chooses to drink milk. These included almost every celebrity you can think of, everyone from Heidi Klum to Martha Stuart, even Wolverine and Batman have embraced their milk mustache. “Got Milk” is still used today… 17 years later!

Results:

Goodby and Manning got the results they hoped for and then some. “The response came in waves. The advertising community was first and they loved it. Aaron Burr won the Best in Show award at the 1994 Clio Awards, the advertising industry’s equivalent of the motion picture industry’s Academy Awards, or Oscars. In 1994, California’s milk sales increased for the first time in over a decade, to 755 million gallons from the previous year’s 740 million.” The campaign was even so successful that a year later they continued it while co-branding milk with Oreos. Also, “In 2001, Manning convinced the board that the CMPB needed a web site to promote the “got milk?” campaign on the Internet.” The “Got Milk” slogan went on to be used on household products, such as oven mitts and baby bibs, and things like tee shirts and magnets. In 2006, the aired their first Spanish ad based on Mexican folklore that incorporated the “Got Milk?” slogan. According to the Got Milk website, the campaign has over 90% awareness in the US.

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