Got confused?

This is the California Milk Processor Board campaign, begun in 1993.


This is the National Fluid Milk Processors Promotion Board campaign, begun in 1995:


Two different clients.  Two different campaigns.  Unfortunately, consumers never did realize the difference.  Fortunately, both clients realized that fighting to differentiate their campaign was counter-productive.  And so in 1998, we started seeing with this:


Another example where consumers know best.  Yeah, baby!

Comments

Åsk Dabitch said…
Aren't you oversimplifying what really happened with the Milk (east coast west coast) account just a teeeeensyyy weeensy bit there? The "Got milk" tagline comes from Goodby - the moustache comes from Californi aand Goodby Silverstein and Partners for the California Milk client (ie; west coast).

http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/case_histories/3000

The slogan "got milk?" was licensed to the National Milk Processor Board (MilkPEP) in 1998 to use on their celebrity print ads - ie; smaller clients campaign proved so successful it was added to larger (national) clients campaign - even though the dimwits kept doing that sad moustache thing thus making the line do nothing.

I don't read it as consumers made them merge the campaign, I read it as national client didn't have the balls (or ability because they were under moustache-contract with another agency on the ast coast) to run the highly succesful campaign that ran in California. These are two different campaigns from two different agencies on two different coasts to begin with.
March 16, 2008 at 4:53 AM
Åsk Dabitch said…
(I'm not saying that you didn't point that out - rereading it, it may lok like I did - I'm just saying I've never heard of "consumers not being able to tell the difference" - the stories I heard were quite the opposite)
March 16, 2008 at 4:54 AM
Craig McNamara said…
The problem of consumers merging the campaigns into one was given as the primary reason for finally doing just that, in "The Milk Mustache Book," written by Jay Shulberg, Bernie Hogya and Sal Taibi of Bozell Worldwide. As the campaign's creators, I'm assuming they're they know the reason best. I clearly recall, once both campaigns were noticed by popular culture, how often an image of someone in a milk mustache was paired with the Got Milk" themeline -- the back of the book has pages of examples of this.

The truth is, the public is rarely as interested in the minutia of advertising as ad people are, and to their credit, both milk groups realized that they'd both benefit by not fighting the consumers' perception.

And no, the "Got Milk?" line didn't really add anything to the milk-mustache visuals, but at that point in the campaign, it didn't really need to.
March 19, 2008 at 4:00 PM
Åsk Dabitch said…
Yeah but Bozell (moustache campaign) peeps wrote that book and Goodby people have been telling me a very different story.
April 1, 2008 at 6:50 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not just hyperbole

Image
Maybe you've seen this classic Guinness poster, created back in the '30s and assumed that it was nothing more than silly hyperbole: And you'd be partly right. The idea is actually based on the high iron content of Guinness (probably from the water used), though of course, the benefit of this is exaggerated to an unbelievable extent in the poster above. That didn't stop the image from becoming so iconic that a pint Guinness became known as a "girder." The image also inspired this parody from Heinekin some 40 years later (though its likely that many young drinkers never realized its source), that both fit the idea into its own ad format and made the male sexual subtext even more implicit: (Best not to take any of this too seriously, though. In reality, the pictures in the Heinken ad would have to be reversed.)
Read more

Fly Me Again

Image
We referenced this ad campaign in an earlier post , but it really deserves its own entry. This memorable/notorious American Airlines campaign appeared back in 1971, at the behest of National Airlines'  Lewis Maytag  who sought to modernize the airline and the image of its stewardesses.  (Yes, they were still known as stewardesses back then.) At the time, airline advertising had frequently based their messages on the friendliness and attentiveness of their stewardesses, but previous efforts tended more toward the chauvinistic end of sexism spectrum, treating them more like Ladies Of The Air than ladies of the night: (Despite the caveman ethos of the headline and illustration, if you click on the ad to enlarge it and read the copy, you'll see it's actually about men being so beguiled by their stewardesses that they often took them for wives -- after first mistaking wives for servants, I suppose.) But now, with the sexual revolution and women's liberation in full swing (an
Read more

I wanted to like this ad, I really did

Image
When I first came across it, I (wrongly) assumed it was the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, using a very minimalist layout to catch attention and evoke emotion, sort of like they did with the Polaroid ads in the ‘60s . No logo, just a simple headline, and an intriguing illustration that tells you nothing about the product, only the elation it will inspire in the woman in the your life. What an incredible way to portray a woman leaping into the arms of her man, I thought, showing only what’s necessary to imply the situation, spurring the reader to imagine the embrace, the eyes, the kiss.   Brilliant, I thought. Then I read the headline.    “Wear an Arrow Shirt and you'll simply sweep her off her feet!”   No.   No, I don’t believe this ad, even for a minute.    The only way to sell this scenario is if the emotion implied feels true. Even in 1949, it’s hard to imagine anyone got this excited about a dress shirt. Unless he just got home from the service and this is the first time in years
Read more