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.

More information:

• http://www.gotmilk.com/
• http://www.milk.com/value/innovator-spring99.html
• http://inventorspot.com/articles/got_milkinventive_marketing_5569
• http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/case_histories/3000

Client: USC University Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital

Ad Agency: Swanson and Russell

Launch Date: January 6, 2010

The Challenge

The challenge was “to create awareness of and preference for USC University Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital, the two private hospitals that USC acquired from Tenet Health in April 2009.” (Ridgeway).  After doing research, they realized that there was a low awareness in Southern California and in the L.A. area of these hospitals. They needed to make these two newly acquired hospitals first choice in people’s mind.

Insight

Mitchell R. Creem, chief executive officer of the hospitals said that “consumer research suggests that the greater L.A. community is largely unfamiliar with these two excellent patient care facilities.” However, it is clear the L.A. community is very familiar with the USC sports teams. They are in the Pacific-10 Conference, NCAA Division 1, and have 19 varsity teams. Their football stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, holds 100,000 people and has hosted the Olympics (not once, but twice!) as well as the Super Bowl and World Series. Their basketball center, the Galen Center, holds another 11,000 people. It is obvious that sports rule this school and passion for their University runs high (even for non-students).  If you can get the attention of the sports fans and make a connection to them, you are reaching a very large group of people.

Approach

Swanson and Russell had a lot to work with when designing this new direction for the new USC University Hospital and the new USC Norris Cancer Hospital. It would have been easy to take a factual direction based on the facts that U.S. News & World Report as two of America’s best hospitals in certain specialties. In addition, 95 of their doctors made the “Best Doctors” list, which “is an annual peer-review survey of the medical profession published by Best Doctors, Inc. [95] Doctors of USC were ranked by their peers as the best in clinical care in their respective specialties nationally in the 2007 survey.” (www.doctorsofusc.com) However, they decided to build on what was already there when it came to creating awareness for the USC hospitals and take a more emotional approach. The USC has a strong athletic following for their basketball and football teams, which means many of their target audience in the L.A. area already knows their rally cry “fight on.” Swanson and Russell used the slogan “fight on” as the basis of their huge awareness campaign. They had a large audience paying attention to the school that the hospitals are connected to and so it made sense to create a positive link in peoples mind from the school to the hospitals. It represents the doctors that “fight on” for their patients and new cures, as well as the patients that “fight on” for their lives everyday. People in the USC area are proud of their school and proud of their team. Now, they should be just as proud of their hospital.

Solution

Swanson and Russell made the decision to use real life moments in the hospital for the images of the campaign. They are “shown through documentary-style photography of USC physicians and staff as they treat and care for patients.” They bring a realness and a fresh look to health care campaigns. The “fight on” multimedia campaign includes:

• Out-of-home billboards and wallscapes, even including a video wallscape, will be seen in locations throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area and Orange County.

•A high-impact ad display will be featured in Los Angeles’ Union Station beginning at launch and continuing through January
2010. It will showcase six doctors, one at a time, using installation work.

• Radio spots in an initial six-month term on 14 radio stations throughout the L.A. listening area 
featuring the voice of actor Oliver Platt

SCRIPT:

Before sunrise and long into the night, you’ll fi nd us here, rolling up our sleeves and pondering

two simple words: “What else?”

What else can we do to save a life or make a breakthrough?

What else can we do today that others thought impossible just yesterday?

And those two words are always answered by two more. Two simple yet powerful words:

Fight On.

USC University Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital.

• Digital banner ads promoting the hospitals and key service lines on WebMD and LATimes.com

• Brand print ads in the Los Angeles Times and local newspapers throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties

• Online paid and organic search promotion through Google Adwords and Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.

• There is section on the USC  website dedicated to showing off this new direction. It includes images from the campaign, a section on featured doctors, and a campaign showcase to see print ads as well as video commercials. Rotating versions of “fight on” ads are also the first thing you see even on the hospital’s homepage, showing their commitment to this new attitude.

(http://www.uscuniversityhospital.org/campaign)

Results

The campaign was launched just last month, so it is a bit too early to see the direct results yet. However, it tested extremely well. “The creative campaign was tested with consumers from the L.A. metro area before launch and the positive response was overwhelming,” said Jane Brust, associate senior vice president of USC Health Sciences Public Relations and Marketing. “Consumers told us that the campaign is extremely compelling and that the ads give them a positive opinion of the hospitals. The Fight On tagline tested especially well; it made a strong emotional connection with consumers relative to the way they think about their own health.”

To see the entire brand campaign, visit http://www.uscuniversityhospital.org/campaign

And for the article in the school paper, visit http://uscnews.usc.edu/university/usc_hospitals_launch_new_campaign.html

The fashion survey had all really positive responses. At first, I thought I was going to use this as the subject of my book. I decided to go with the reptile book because the fashion book was getting to be too much about the images and not the text.

The lizard survey had a photo collage of the picture, some of which were used in the actual book. All the photos were bright and colorful and showed the images in their natural habitat.

As for my surveys, they were given to 6th graders. They responded well to the images. The boys tended to like the subject matter of lizards and snakes more than most of the girls did, but I expected that.

I also thought of using a box just around the letter that the picture represents which will tie into my man made book.