got milk? By Douglas B. Holt, L'Oreal Professor of Marketing, University of Oxford 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 In June 1993, Jeff Manning, Executive Director, was hired by the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) to revive sagging milk consumption in California. A month later, he hired San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to create a new ad campaign for milk. "We weren't going to turn around a 15-year decline in per capita in one year, but we did believe that at least for certain portions of the population, we could flatten it out and start to move it up," said Manning. Following Manning's lead, Jeff Goodby, the agency's co-founder and chief creative, had worked with a team of planners and creatives at his agency to create got milk?, a campaign that became one of the decade's most popular and critically-acclaimed ad campaigns. (1) CMPB: Marketing Milk as a Commodity Concerned with long-term declining milk sales, California's largest milk processors voted to fund a marketing board that would be charged with creating advertising dedicated to selling milk. The processors agreed to finance the California Milk Processor Board (2) by contributing three cents for every gallon of milk they processed. This assessment allowed for a $23 million/year marketing budget. On a per-capita basis (California's population was roughly 20% of the US), this budget approximated those of the largest national auto, beer, finance, and pharmaceutical brands. The processors agreed that they would assess the new board's effectiveness every three years, As their first act, the board had hired Manning and he reported to CMPB's board of nine representatives. Prior to the CMPB's formation, the California Milk Advisory Board (CMAB), had for many years produced the "Milk Does a Body Good" ad campaign. The campaign echoed the government's nutrition program, which encouraged people to drink a few glasses of milk each day to maintain their health. 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-and especially kids and teens-still considered milk to be as boring as a beverage could possibly be. Since people thought milk was good for them but sales volume was falling anyway, Manning felt that his first decision was handed to him: he would abandon the nutrition theme. Shifts in Beverage Consumption Perceptions of Milk Historically, dairy advertising and public relations efforts, along with government programs, had helped to build the widely held belief that drinking milk was the key to good health, particularly

for children. Drinking milk linked the consumer to the dairy farms out in the rural countryside, a space implied to be healthier, both morally and hygienically. Later, this "wholesome" theme was expanded to include the notion that milk was nutritious. Beginning in earnest after World War II, the US government, schools, and doctors had all promoted milk as a nutritious drink, a necessary component of a healthy diet, especially for children. Once each day, school administrators had lined up children in front of stainless steel milk dispensers and gave them each a paper cup of cool, fresh milk. The US Department of Agriculture had recommended nutritional requirements which divided the human diet into four "food groups"- meats & fish, fruits & vegetables, cereals & grains, and dairy products. Teachers included these recommendations into their lessons about health and nutrition. Health care professionals like school nurses and pediatricians taught mothers that it was important to drink four glasses of milk each day. By the 1950s, milk had assumed an important role in what people thought was a normal, nutritious lifestyle. In the United States then, milk had been a family staple. On the contrary, people thought of soft drinks as recreational leisure products. Sodas, then, were in a great position to represent many of the things that milk did not. Beginning with Pepsi in the 1960s-and then followed by virtually every other soda-beverage makers began to associate their sweet carbonated drinks with youthful lifestyles. By the 1970s, soda makers' aggressive marketing was helping to erode milk's place in consumers' diets, stealing "share of stomach." People were drinking less milk, substituting soft drinks, even when they were at home. Flavor and Packaging Innovation Marketers were also aggressively reconfiguring the way beverages were packaged. Drinks of all varieties came in containers that numbered hundreds of shapes and even more colors. New, easyopen containers were resealable so that people could drink from them with little effort while they did other things, like drive cars, ride bicycles, and use exercise machines. Unlike milk's messy cardboard box, its competing beverages traveled well. Manning couldn't control how milk was packaged and he knew that it was still sold in monotonous cardboard boxes or translucent plastic jugs. And milk's Spartan label, typically printed in a single color, likely featured only nutritional information and an expiration date, hardly enticing draws compared to the packaging of the new, competitive beverages. On the variety front, processors had experimented with an innovation or two, but to Manning, lactosefree milk offered little encouragement: "Milk was white and came in gallons." Competitors' Symbolism Finally, Manning had to face milk's seemingly most intractable hurdle. "Milk was boring," he said. Compared to the proliferation of brightly colored beverages in myriad, imaginative packages, milk had an image problem. Milk was still associated with domesticity and it was apparent to him that most consumers were no longer excited by the tamed life.

If milk had represented a domesticity that had fallen out of style, many of its new competitors had accrued altogether different meanings-like youthful rebellion, eclectic individuality, and streetsmart fashion. The most successful new brands each used advertising to help create this symbolism. In the 1990s, Gatorade, Snapple, Mountain Dew, and Sprite led the way. Snapple. With its eclectic range of "100% Natural" teas and juice-drinks, Snapple was a huge success. While consumers loved these beverages for their innovative flavors, it was their quirky advertising and promotions that attracted many drinkers. Snapple presented itself as the anticorporate beverage company. For instance, they aired poorly produced ads starring Ivan Lendl mispronouncing the drink and a whole series of ads that featured their no-nonsense customer service manager, "Wendy," answering customers' letters. They also hired Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, both of whom enjoyed anti-authority reputations, to hawk the drink. Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew sales rocketed behind the success of the "Do the Dew" advertising campaign. The ads featured four irreverent "slacker" guys who thrived on ultradangerous stunts. The ads claimed, with tongue in cheek, that Mountain Dew was even more potent and daring than these risky feats. The ads often parodied popular culture and incorporated energetic rock music. Gatorade. Originally formulated to combat dehydration problems for the University of Florida football team, Gatorade became the "functional" beverage of choice. The brand was advertised using Michael Jordan ("Be Like Mike") and purported to show how Gatorade helped the basketball superstar to achieve a high level of performance. By the early 1990s, the drink had evolved from an athlete's isotonic to a popular everyday drink. Sprite. Behind their "Obey Your Thirst" campaign, Sprite sales increased steadily from 1993 to 1998. The ads were especially popular with young consumers and told drinkers not to pay attention to conventional marketing pleas. Instead, consumers were supposed to adopt Sprite's playful cynicism, which often featured leading rap artists and professional basketball players which, together, wove Sprite into hip-hop culture popular amongst America's urban metro youth. The got milk? Campaign 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. Recalling a strategy that his Ketchum co-worker had explored a few years earlier, Manning suggested that people who drank milk tended to think of it as an accompaniment to certain sweet and sticky foods that they loved. To explain this "blankand-milk" notion, Manning told Goodby that many people who drank milk did so with brownies, cookies, or peanut butter sandwiches. Perhaps, Manning suggested, the key for the new campaign could be found in this food-beverage connection. Goodby's team fielded qualitative research and learned that many consumers indeed linked milk with sweet, sticky snacks. Pushing further, the researchers flipped around the question: how do

people feel when they're eating something that demanded milk to wash it down, but don't have milk in the house? Focus group respondents placed in this situation were upset, they felt deprived. They were able to convey viscerally the feeling of having a brownie or cookie remnants stuck in their throat, calling out for a gulp of milk to cleanse the palette. Goodby and his team used this consumer insight as the spark for what came to be called the deprivation strategy: rather than selling milk as a complement to certain foods, instead the strategy became to remind milk drinkers of the anxiety and disappointment that came when milk wasn't available at crucial moments. 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?" The agency created a few print ads which showed snacks like chocolate cupcakes and cookies, each with a bite taken out of them and the text, "got milk?" Manning thought that they perfectly expressed the way people felt about a moment when they craved milk and encouraged Goodby to pursue the "milk deprivation strategy" for television ads. Manning 's research showed that 88% of milk was consumed in the home. He and Goodby agreed that their milk deprivation ads would incorporate this reality. The ads would show people running out of milk when they needed it most, in their homes. "The whole campaign was based on somebody sitting at home thirty feet from the fridge with the TV on," said Manning. "We wanted them to feel the pain." Launch Ads Goodby's team produced six ads to launch the campaign. Several of these ads created a stir. The first, Aaron Burr, became one of the most popular ads of the early Nineties. Burr featured an odd and seemingly irrelevant situation for milk deprivation: an iconoclastic history nut who fails to win a prize on a call-in radio show on history trivia because his mouth is glued shut with a peanut butter sandwich. Market research confirmed what Goodby and Manning had hoped for. Respondents indicated that drinking milk was becoming a fashionable thing to do. "Suddenly, drinking milk was cool," recalled Manning. Manning and Goodby were as buoyed by their campaign's popularity as they were with milk's improving sales. "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. Within months, the "got milk?" advertisements became famous. The tagline, "got milk?" spawned countless imitations wherein "milk" was exchanged for virtually any product or concept. Everywhere you looked, publicity-seekers were tagging onto the campaign by converting the slogan to suit their purposes. Making Milk Cool

Elated, Manning and Goodby sought to extend this dual strategy. They wanted to continue with the deprivation strategy, stimulating people to drink milk when they ate complementary foods. And, in addition, they also wanted to seize the opportunity to revamp milk's symbolism. Their second round of ads would continue to push milk's image from boring and old-fashioned drink to one that was cool and interesting. In May, 1994, they broadcasted an ad that immediately scored high marks for its "cool factor." In Heaven, an obnoxious yuppie character found that hell was a place where giant chocolate chip cookies and milk cartons were ubiquitous. Unfortunately, the cartons were empty. To adults confronting the cut-throat 1990s job market, Heaven proved nearly as popular and durable as Burr. Co-branding Californians now were taken by the got milk? campaign and well understood the deprivation idea. So Manning and Goodby wanted to broaden and accentuate the eating situations that evoked the need for a milk chaser. Rather than treating milk-worthy foods in a generic way, they decided to co-brand with well-known complements. A year later Manning broadcast another co-branding ad, this time using the popular cookie, Oreos. Shot in black-and-white to emphasize its historical setting, Oreo Kane mimicked the famous movie Citizen Kane. The spot featured a crusty CEO presiding over a Gilded Age board meeting, demanding better suggestions for names for the company's new cookie. Teens "Teens-the 12-18 demographic-were without question the number one target of all the beverage advertising," Manning said. "Because you wanted to get them early on, grab them, get them into your franchise so that maybe they'd stay Coke users or Snapple users or Gatorade users or whatever." Research data showed that consumers steadily drank less milk as they aged and that their shift away from drinking milk began around the age of 10. As young consumers progressed through their teen years, their milk consumption steadily declined while their consumption of other beverages steadily increased. Consumers between 18 and 24 drank 44 gallons of soft drinks, but they drank only 17.2 gallons of milk. Throughout the "got milk?" campaign, Goodby and Manning had hoped that their advertising would appeal to younger audiences and increase their milk consumption. Once again, however, Manning's research indicated that while adults loved the spots that featured children and teens, younger consumers resonated less enthusiastically with them. "We didn't advertise to teens," Manning said. Nevertheless, a number of ads that featured teen protagonists proved to be popular among teens. Interrogation, for instance, was about a young man in a leather jacket being questioned by two plainclothes cops. In November, 1996, Manning broadcasted Isolation, which told the story of a university student who'd agreed to be a research subject and to live inside an observation chamber alone for thirty days. Both ads tested well among teen and young adult males.

Extending the Creative Idea: Town Without Milk Despite the campaign's popularity, by 1997 Goodby had begun to question whether the campaign was wearing out. Focus group respondents were beginning to identify the new spots within seconds after they began to play on the video monitor. This concerned him because even though respondents were still saying that they liked the spots, he speculated that the recurring joke was becoming stale. Manning shared Goodby's concern and agreed to a new take on the campaign. Goodby's team proposed a provocative and imaginative extension: the next series of ads should acknowledge that milk deprivation was no longer a surprise, but a chronic condition. "Town Without Milk was a whole tangent we took to try to keep the campaign fresh," said Manning. "At my request, we tried to pursue advertising that took us to a different place. Not strategically, but executionally." Goodby led his creatives through a series of four spots that depicted the heartbreak of a fictional "town without milk." Shot in black & white, the spots were conceptually more complex than their predecessors. Research group respondents found the ads fresh and entertaining, and, especially pleasing to Goodby, they didn't see the ads' punchlines coming. Yet when Manning watched the way people responded when shown the ads, he became uneasy. He found that they reacted with considerably less visceral identification than he'd observed in the initial breakthrough ads. He agreed to broadcast the first two ads in August, 1997, and because people generally liked them, he broadcasted the remaining two later in the year. Triggering Deprivation at the Refrigerator In 2001, Manning convinced the board that the CMPB needed a web site to promote the "got milk?" campaign on the internet. The website would feed consumers interest in the got milk? Campaign as popular culture. But, more importantly, it would serve as a vehicle to promote products with the got milk slogan. Manning was looking for any way possible that he trigger consumers' deprivations feelings in their homes. So he introduced a line of kitchen products that get the message within feet of the refrigerator. Goodby produced ads to promote these items. The first advertised baby bottles printed with the "got milk?" logo and the second promoted "got milk?" oven mitts. Subsequently, the CMPB sold a number of kitchen items, such as baby bibs, aprons, and dish towels. Likewise, Manning sought to time his media buys to when people were most likely in a milk deprivation situation. He had televised Aaron Burr during the dinner hours, and was increasingly buying late-night television time. People ate midnight snacks, he reasoned, which were often milk-friendly brownies or cookies or even milk-dependent cereal. "We wanted to remind them, when they were within thirty feet of the refrigerator, that it was a good time to have a snack that went with milk." However, while he appreciated the utility of reminding consumers to drink milk when they were likely to be eating milk-friendly foods, Manning was exasperated that his product could be tied

to foods whose sales may have been in decline. He became abundantly aware that it was possible to lose business if people consumed less of the other products. "Every time cereal sales went down a point, my business went down a quarter of a point, because about a quarter of our business was in their bowls," Manning said. "So the fact that cereal was down three percent drove me nuts because it was taking my numbers down and it had absolutely nothing to do with milk. Consumers were just choosing a granola bar over Cheerios. So we've tried to change that scenario." Priming Purchase at Point-of-Sale "Our research indicated 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." From the campaign's beginning, Goodby Silverstein had made outdoor ads to place along hightraffic commuter routes. Like the television spots, the billboards and bus stop ads tied the tagline to sweet, gooey foods like chocolate cupcakes and Oreo cookies. The simple prompts were supposed to remind commuters to buy milk when they had the chance, so that later they wouldn't find themselves deprived, like a character in the television ads. Pursuing the same goal, Manning had "got milk?" decals placed on convenience store floors to remind customers to stop at the dairy case. In grocery store produce sections, he arranged to have "got milk?" stickers placed on fresh bananas. "People loved to slice up bananas and put it on their cereal," he said. "I thought it would be a good idea to remind them, that as long as they were buying the bananas, to buy the milk." In April 2000, Goodby broadcast a television spot which played this same strategic card, but which also poked fun of the campaign's ubiquity. Everywhere summarized a white collar man's day-his morning preparations, commute to the office, work, his commute home-showing along the way that he passed near, under, or in front of so many "got milk?" ads that he couldn't possibly forget to buy milk when he visited the grocer. Yet when he finally walked into his foyer that evening clutching a brown grocery bag printed with a "got milk?" logo he realized that he'd forgotten the milk. Targeting Mexican-Americans The 2000 U.S. census reported that nationally, peoples of Latin American origin (primarily from Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico) had edged up to around 12% of the population. But in California, Latin Americans, mostly of Mexican descent, constituted 32% of the population, up from around 25% in 1990. "We knew Hispanic families were larger. They loved milk-whole milk, in fact-and they ate at home more often," said Manning. Manning believed that the CMPB's overall strategy could easily transfer to Spanish-speaking targets. "Everything we knew about Hispanic families led us to believe that selling milk to them at home with food was good strategy," Manning said.

In 2001, Goodby created a Spanish-language television ad. La Llorona was based on a Mexican folk tale about a woman who drowned her children to spite her adulterous husband. Eternally sorry, she wandered the earth as a ghost in search of her lost children. "She's kind of the boogie man in Mexico," Goodby explained. "The interesting thing about this ad was that the Hispanics thought it was funny." Non-Hispanics, Goodby noted, "thought it was some sort of tie-in to a ghost movie." La Llorona also satisfied Manning's desire to make ads that generated their own publicity. The ad received lavish media coverage because it was the first Spanish language spot to be broadcast on Anglo television.

Got Milk?
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The logo of the "Got Milk?" campaign.

Got Milk? (stylized as got milk?) is an American advertising campaign encouraging the consumption of cow's milk, which was created by the advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners for the California Milk Processor Board in 1993 and later licensed for use by milk processors and dairy farmers. It has been running since October 24, 1993. The campaign has been credited with greatly increasing milk sales in California[1] though not nationwide.[2] Got Milk? is one of the most famous commodity brand and influential campaigns in the United States.

Contents

1 History 2 Related advertising 3 Parodies and references 4 References 5 External links

History
The phrase was created by the advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners. In an interview in Art & Copy, a 2009 documentary that focused on the origins of famous advertising slogans, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein said that the phrase almost didn't turn into an advertising campaign. According to a New York Times piece, people at Goodby, Silverstein "thought it was lazy, not to mention grammatically incorrect."[3]

The advertisements would typically feature people in various situations involving dry or sticky foods and treats such as cookies. The person then would find himself in an uncomfortable situation due to a full mouth and no milk to wash it down. At the end of the commercial the character would look sadly to the camera and boldly displayed would be the words, "Got Milk?" The first Got Milk? advert ran on October 29, 1993, and featured a hapless history buff (played by Sean Whalen) receiving a call to answer a radio station's $10,000 trivia question (voiced by Rob Paulsen), "Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel?" (referring to the Burr Hamilton duel). The man's apartment is shown to be a private museum to the duel, packed with artifacts. He answers the question correctly, saying "Aaron Burr", but because his mouth is full of peanut butter and he has no milk to wash it down, his answer is unintelligible. The ad, directed by Hollywood director Michael Bay, was at the top of the advertising industry's award circuit in 1994.[4] From 1994 to 1995, fluid milk sales in the 12 regions totaled 23.3 billion pounds, and increased advertising expenditures amounted to $37.9 million. In 2002, the ad was named one of the ten best commercials of all time by a USA Today poll, and was run again nationwide that same year. It has since been featured in books on advertising and used in case studies.[citation needed] The slogan "Got Milk?" was licensed to the National Milk Processor Board (MilkPEP) in 1995 to use on their celebrity print ads, which, since then, have included celebrities from the fields of sports, media and entertainment, as well as fictional characters from TV, video games, and film such as The Simpsons, Batman, Mario, The Powerpuff Girls posing in print advertisements sporting a "milk mustache," employing the slogan, "Where's your mustache?" Former California Gov. Gray Davis expressed his dislike for one commercial and asked if there was a way to remove it from the air. It featured two children who refused to drink milk because their elderly next-door neighbor is energetic despite not drinking it. He is going to use his wheelbarrow when suddenly his arms snap off, because without his consumption of milk, his bones are weak and frail. The now-frightened children start imbibing the fluid.[5] In 2006, the campaign went after a new demographic with a series of Spanish-language Toma Leche? or Do you take/drink milk? ads in which milk is touted as a "wonder tonic" with muscle and hair building qualities.[6] According to the Got Milk? website, the campaign has over 90% awareness in the US and the tag line has been licensed to dairy boards across the US since 1995. Got Milk? is a powerful property and has been licensed on a range of consumer goods including Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels, baby and teen apparel, and kitchenware. The trademarked line has been widely parodied by groups championing a variety of causes. Many of these parodies use a lookalike rather than the actual persons used in the original Got Milk? adverts. In 2008, the campaign capitalized on the poor economic condition of Americans and used financial adviser and talk show host, Suze Orman, in an effort to advertise milk as a smart and nutritious commodity to purchase.[7] The voice saying "Got Milk?" in the television commercials is that of veteran voiceover actor Denny Delk, however other anonymous narrators have said the question on occasion.

Some Got Milk? ads varied the slogan to say, "Got Chocolate Milk?"[8][9]

Related advertising
Beginning in 2011, an advertising campaign was launched primarily attacking the soy milk industry. The themes of these ads are comparable to the Got Milk? ads, but with such messages as "real milk isn't made from beans and nuts" or "real milk requires no shaking".

Parodies and references

The slogan is a snowclone, having appeared in numerous alternative versions on t-shirts, advertisements, and real advertisements. For the most part the California Milk Processor Board has ignored the alternative uses, although in 2007 it threatened lawsuit against PETA for its antidairy campaign, "Got pus", which began in 2002. By 2007, the slogan had become an international icon and the phrase has been parodied more than any other ad slogan.[10] In 1999, the Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet" featured a planet inhabited by robots spending their time looking for humans to slaughter them. In their main city, an ad was displayed saying "Got Milk? Then you are a human and must be killed". In 2004, the slogan was imitated by artist David Rosen, with the popular political design "Got Democracy?", in reaction to the Iraq war.[11][12] In 2002, a Washington resident applied for a vanity plate reading "GOTMILF". This plate was approved, but was later canceled after complaints were filed against it.[13] In August 2012, the YouTube sensation GloZell made a video called "GloZell's Cereal Challenge". In the video, she uses the sentence "Got milk?". [14] In episode 2 of Family Guy Season 2, "Got milk" is displayed on their TV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Got_Milk%3F http://www.aef.com/on_campus/classroom/case_histories/3000 http://www.asaecenter.org/Resources/ANowDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=18644

Got Milk? Marketing by Association

ASSOCIATIONS NOW, July 2006, Feature By: Jeff Manning

All Jeff Manning wanted to do was sell milk. Lots of it. And as executive director of the California Milk Processor Board, he certainly did so. Unplanned, though, was that a quirky statewide advertising campaign would end up as one of the world's most acclaimed marketing programs. Here's what you can learn from his experience as godfather of Got Milk. Summary: The California Milk Processor Board needed to reverse plunging industry sales fast, or its members could literally have lost the farm. Its "Got Milk?" marketing campaign not only helped turn around milk sales but also changed the face of consumer marketing forever. The board's former executive director shares the effective elements of the now-legendary campaign and the careful choreography executed in its broad-based strategy. Rating: Rate This Item 0 Comments

Lauded as one of the most beloved and successful marketing campaigns ever, Got Milk? was born of desperation. The California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) needed to reverse plunging industry sales fast, or its members could lose the farm. Got Milk? not only helped turn around milk sales but also changed the face of consumer marketing forever. Even after 13 years, the organization's groundbreaking "milkdeprivation" strategy--now recognized internationally--continues to evolve and thrive. The campaign, which turned a catchy milk mantra into a social icon, derived from more than just witty television commercials. Rather, it flowed from alliances with great food brands, innovative licensing deals, multicultural and Internet marketing, powerful publicity, strong industry relations and revenue development, and careful choreography of every element within its broad-based strategy. Historically, the dairy industry had channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into "good-for-you" advertising. Dairy leaders then watched as consumers reached for Coke, Snapple, or Gatorade, and milk sales steadily eroded. Clearly, the public's taste for milk had begun to sour. California milk sales were declining three percent to four percent per year, faster than anywhere else in the country. For decades the state's population growth had camouflaged the fact that per capita consumption was falling from 29 gallons in 1980 to 23 gallons in 1993. By early 1993 California milk processors had concluded

that they could no longer depend on population growth to buoy sales, current marketing programs were not working, and they needed to take charge of their own marketing destiny. Hired as the first paid staff member for the CMPB, I worked with the board to first establish an aggressive, numbers-driven objective: stabilize and reverse milk sales. We could do this because we had enough money to get the job done. This alignment of goals and budgets is absolutely crucial to the success of any campaign or organization. Frankly, associations sometimes establish objectives that are unachievable within their budgets, thus ensuring that they will miss their marks. A Strategy of Deprivation and "Terror" Our next step--a global review of milk marketing--revealed a stunning finding: Every branded and generic campaign was based on a "good-for-you" strategy aimed at improving consumer attitudes. The problem? Some 96 percent of U.S. consumers already believed that milk was healthy; more than half said that they should drink more; and all the "good-for-you" stuff hadn't increased sales. Obviously, we needed a campaign founded on an entirely different strategic platform. Toward that end, we recognized that milk (unlike sodas, bottled water, and sports drinks) is seldom consumed as a standalone beverage. More than 90 percent of all milk occasions are with food, especially "codependent food" such as cookies, brownies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chocolate flavorings, and, of course, cold cereal. (In fact, 25 percent of all milk is consumed from a bowl.) Most important, though, was that the only time people care passionately about milk is when they run out--that common, terrible situation when they pour the cereal, slice the banana, and then find that the carton has been returned to the fridge empty. Got Milk? was born. The magic of the resulting "milk deprivation strategy" for Got Milk? was fivefold: 1. The premise is true. It reflects the way people actually consume milk. 2. It was a radical departure from everything that had been done before and was incredibly newsworthy. 3. It led to smart, humorous advertising that people coveted. 4. Milk-deprivation was inclusive. Running out of milk was just as aggravating for an 80-year-old man as it was for an eight-year-old kid.

5. It was intensely competitive. You simply could not dunk your Oreos in Coke or Snapple. Every company, every brand, every organization, every association should fight for this type of differentiating competitive strategy. Measuring Milk Prior to launching Got Milk? we needed to deal with metrics. How were we going to evaluate the program and provide a return on investment to our stakeholders? We decided not to research consumer attitudes. (As my then-chairman said, "Try taking attitudes to the bank.") Rather, we conducted benchmark, precampaign research on milk usage. Called the "Beyond the Glass" study, it tracked how much milk was consumed with what foods by whom at what hours of the day and night. For the first time, the industry could track behavior. This same study has been fielded at least once per year since 1993, providing a rich, albeit sometimes painful, look at what's going down people's gullets. Got Milk? advertising launched in late 1993, and included "Aaron Burr," a hilarious television commercial about the famous duel with Alexander Hamilton. It was unexpected, funny, risky, and planted Got Milk? into the California vernacular. The advertising agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, was a relatively small, local shop. Unlike so many of the monolithic agencies, the principals were personally involved in the creation of the work. (Jeff Goodby wrote the line "Got Milk?"). Despite growing to a billion-dollar agency since 1993, they remain the holders of the Got Milk? grail. Awareness of Got Milk? reached 90 percent in California by 1995, and massive news coverage boosted visibility nationally. The tracking study indicated that household penetration was holding steady (around 70 percent) and that people were using more milk more often. We also tracked monthly milk sales as stated by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. While self-reported and thus imperfect, these sales figures provided a litmus test of the program that improved stakeholders' confidence that the staff and board were committed and accountable. It didn't hurt that, in addition to sales, there were awards--crates of them. In fact, between 1994 and 2005, Got Milk? won just about every coveted creative and marketing award around. It also became one of the most ripped- off lines in marketing history and clearly entered pop culture.

Marketing by Association While awards are all well and wonderful, five lessons from the campaign seldom receive the credit that they deserve, especially within the association community. All are crucial for nonprofit leaders, regardless of their organization's scope or profession. Lesson 1: Go beyond the color white. In the early 1990s, few branded companies or associations recognized the size, growth curve, or buying power of the Hispanic market. But it was impossible for the California milk industry to ignore, with half of Los Angeles speaking Spanish. Luckily, we didn't follow our initial instincts and force feed Got Milk? to the Latino community. Research indicated that Hispanics were heavy milk consumers already but didn't think running out of milk was funny and sometimes, because of differences in usage that are not accounted for in translation, misunderstood Got Milk? to mean "Are you lactating?" Instead, we marketed to Hispanics in a more traditional, food-and-family way, with a focus on milk-based recipes and cooking. Feedback from the community indicated that this approach was culturally astute and promoted increased milk usage. This multicultural effort also generated widespread news coverage, from local Hispanic newspapers to the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Today, it's not optional for associations to question whether to delve deeply into ethnic marketing. Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians are no longer "minorities;" they are members, officers, customers, and consumers. Lesson 2: Leverage strategic publicity. Far too often publicity is seen as a defensive tactic, a means to control damage. For our organization, it was a weapon, a way to help transfer Got Milk? from a tagline to an icon. Ironically, it took a $300,000 mistake to drive this point home. Early in 1994 we launched a public relations event whereby people, including some Hollywood folks, went without milk. We then built a story around their deprivation tales. The media didn't blink. Not an article or TV segment ran. When called, reporters told us that milk wasn't news. Milk was white, boring, and for babies. They then asked if we did the Got Milk? commercials, the ones where the people got stuck with food in their mouths but had no milk. We said, "Sure." "Great," they replied. "We want to do a feature." Since then, PR efforts have focused squarely on the ads and campaign. Got Milk? is news; milk seldom is. We learned to treat the media as seriously as any target audience, to listen hard and work within their priorities, not ours. This proactive, thoughtful use of PR will work regardless of an association's product or service.

Lesson 3: Don't try to do it alone. Prior to Got Milk? the dairy industry was a standalone marketer. Milk was portrayed cold and white in a glass. The problem was that people didn't consume milk that way. They gulped and guzzled milk with food. Accordingly, rather than avoid foods such as cookies and cereal because they had sugar and calories, we aggressively sought them out as partners. Nestl put Got Milk? on Nesquik boxtops, and Pillsbury allowed us to use its treasured doughboy in a TV commercial. After long negotiations, Got Milk? Oreos were introduced in 2004, with Nabisco embossing our trademark on hundreds of millions of its cookies. And by leveraging the brand recognition of beloved cereal characters such as the Trix rabbit and Snap, Crackle, and Pop (the Rice Krispies mascots) in our ads, we helped sell more of their cereal and our milk. One of our least obvious but hugely successful partnerships was with Dole. This union was based solely on the fact that bananas are the number-one fresh fruit used on cereal. I had roamed a local produce department at the grocery store and zeroed in on those lovely little stickers found on every Dole banana. Only a few months after that visit, Got Milk? stickers could be found on 100 million banana bunches. That's how fast some partnerships--the ones in which everyone truly wins--can come to be. We also combined forces with nonfood brands, including Sesame Street's Cookie Monster, Barbie dolls, and the Girl Scouts of America. Cobranding and collaboration are becoming more critical, and few companies, brands, or associations can afford to isolate themselves. Lesson 4: Create association assets. Nonprofits seldom think in terms of licensing and assets. I certainly didn't. However, by the end of 1994, Got Milk? had received a ton of national publicity and was being used by local dairy associations around the country. We were then approached by one of the national groups, which asked to license the Got Milk? trademark and campaign. We agreed, and by 1997, every dairy organization was licensing Got Milk?, including the famous milk mustache people. (See box on next page.) We also received a call from the Barbie brand manager (I thought she had the wrong number). She asked if the company could introduce a Got Milk? Barbie, complete with bovine attire and milk bottle. I nearly wrecked the deal by asking for royalties. Fortunately, I realized we could never afford the equivalent of such fantastic advertising, so I simply said, "Go right ahead." Initially, I was less enthused about the creation of a Got Milk? Web site. I mean, consumers couldn't buy milk online. What I didn't see at first was that people would lap up Got Milk? T-shirts, baby clothes, and teen apparel. Gotmilk.com finally

launched in 1998, and I quickly learned not to underestimate the potential for associations to develop properties. Ultimately, the trademark generated well more than $10 million in licensing revenues. Perhaps more importantly, it helped transform the trademark from a tagline into a property and asset. Lesson 5: Know how to extend your expiration date. In 2002, milk deprivation was a maturing strategy, and the industry had learned from the campaign how to better identify and address changing trends. Dairy leaders noticed that the calcium competition was intensifying. Dozens of foods and beverages--orange juice, bread, cereal, bottled waters, even soda--were being fortified with calcium. The calciumsupplement industry was ramping up, and lactose intolerance was becoming the disease du jour. It was time to step back, take a tough look, and rethink how milk was positioned--something that every association should practice honestly and objectively. That said, I recall when I nearly misread my board of directors years earlier. Without my realizing it, some of my board members had gotten a bit bored with the campaign. At a meeting when we were discussing another of the agency's stellar ads, they started questioning why we weren't touting the old "good-for-you" message. As I wrote in Got Milk? The Book (Prima Publishing, 1999), I was startled and realized that I had not managed the expectations of board members very well. Instead of moving straight into the new commercials, I should have led a discussion first about what the campaign could and could not likely deliver, as well as demonstrate why the milk-deprivation strategy was still connecting with consumers and the press. Although the board did reaffirm its support for Got Milk? I know that we came close that day to losing an icon. When the calcium discussion arose, I remembered this lesson, and we did indeed work as a group to shed long-held beliefs in order to reignite Got Milk? The result was a shift to a strategy aimed at elevating milk calcium above its competition. Further, we decided to leverage medical research, current events, and hot issues. This shift led to communications that exposed milk's value in reducing the efforts of premenstrual syndrome and its role as a sports-enhancement "substance" secretly used by professional athletes (not well received by Major League Baseball). These lessons, taken together with the overall Got Milk? campaign, are potent reminders that change within our industries and society is accelerating, and we must constantly reevaluate our programs and marketing strategies to measure and respond to it. As association leaders, we need to toss aside entrenchment and

rigidity and instead embrace smart, timely strategic change. For Got Milk? the proof has been in the pudding.