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
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