Mia Fileman 0:05
This is Got Marketing? – a fud-free, fluff-free, no-nonsense podcast for marketers looking to work smarter.
I’m your host, Mia Fileman – a marketing strategist with over two decades of experience, and an entrepreneur.
I’m tired of marketers telling you what you want to hear. Instead, I tell you what you need to hear. During the show, I chat with creatives and strategists about all the aspects of marketing, but especially marketing campaigns. Unpacking and dissecting marketing campaigns is what I do for fun.
Got Marketing? is brought to you by Campaign Del Mar – the marketing education platform where marketers and entrepreneurs go to upskill.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Hello everyone!
I thought it was about time I explained the milk moustache and the milk cartons on this podcast cover art.
My podcast name – Got Marketing? – was inspired by the iconic “Got Milk?” campaign. While there are many iterations of the “Got Milk?” campaign, lots of creatives, the most famous is of well-known celebrities and thought leaders with white milk moustaches. Hence, my podcast cover art.
But we’re going to talk about the “Got Milk?” campaign today because, honestly, it is a marketing masterpiece.
We live in an era of clickbait – cheap tricks to get momentary attention. While most advertising is regarded as disposable – with a shelf life of only a few months, if you’re lucky – “Got Milk?” has endured for more than a decade since it was first released in 1993.
The slogan has become an international icon, and the phrase has been parodied more than any other tagline in history, but marketers like me have a penchant to get obsessed with campaigns that win awards but don’t necessarily drive business results.
In today’s episode, we are going to scratch below the surface of this campaign and unpack how it came about, whether it was a commercial success, and what smaller brands can take away from this campaign.
To have this juicy chat out with me, I have invited back to the Got Marketing? Podcast the smartest and most talented and kindest marketer I know, my good friend, Lauren Pickering.
She is a professional marketer with over 15 years of experience across consumer brands, education, and professional services. Lauren has been the group grand manager of Maybelline New York which is where we met; the senior marketing manager for Barbie – yes, that Barbie; and she is now the executive director of marketing for Lauriston Girls’ School.
Hello!
Laura Pickering 3:07
Hello! Good to be back and get my marketing geek on!
Mia Fileman 3:12
Yes!
This is a fun fact for our listeners. You and I recorded the first ever episode of the Got Marketing? Podcast. I released it as Episode 3, but it was you and I – who had no podcasting experience – recording this podcast from our home offices and totally faking it until we made it.
Laura Pickering 3:40
Why not? It’s fun. It was just fun!
Mia Fileman 3:43
It was fun! Also, fun fact, this is now one of the top 20 marketing podcasts in Australia!
Laura Pickering 3:51
Of course, it is, Mia! It’s you!
Mia Fileman 3:55
Obviously, we’re doing something right.
Laura Pickering 4:00
I’m looking forward to chatting about campaigns. It’s one of my favourite things to do.
Mia Fileman 4:05
Same, babe.
One of the biggest learnings that I have had over the course of the Got Marketing? Podcast is that I need to shut up more and let my really clever guests talk more and shine, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do today.
Why don’t you start us off? Tell us about this campaign. If you’ve never heard of it before, if you’re a Gen Z, if 1993 is the year you were born, then why should you give a flying ship about the “Got Milk?” campaign?
Laura Pickering 4:40
I might go back a few decades – centuries before.
Another fun fact. Did you know that early 20th century studies fed milk to rats and found that the rats who were fed milk had shiny fur, but those who got vegetable oil looked raggedy and scrawny? It was because research like this – and, I guess, a long history of dairy farming in the US – that had us even today considering milk as this fundamental part of our diets.
For decades and decades, the milk industry was so dominant in every aspect of beverage consumption, relying on this promise that milk is good for you. And it is. I’m not disputing that. The calcium. The protein. It’s good for pregnant women. Fresh country air connotations about farming. Advertising and PR in the US and all over the world really promoted milk as a wholesome drink. Doctors endorsed it. It was on the table at school cafeterias in the US.
But something happened in the 70s, and in particular in the 80s, that changed all of that. That’s really the Pepsi and Coke effect. They came along and they aggressively positioned their beverages. They positioned them with celebrities. They were fun, sexy, and youthful. They made milk look boring – buying it, drinking it, everything about it.
Soda, therefore, started becoming the beverage of choice. People no longer would drink milk. They just used it for bits and pieces. The milk industry went, “Oh, this is an issue.” They went on an advertising agency who took a step back and really looked at what was going on with this product that is in all households. They really observed customers and had a lot of focus groups and realised that drinking milk is no longer exciting.
But, gee, isn’t it frustrating when you go to pour it in your cereal – or you go to make pikelets as I was the other day – and you have no milk. It’s at that moment when you realise, “Oh. I’ve got to always have it in my fridge. It’s a staple.” That’s the context of the ad. What was working for milk was no longer cutting the mustard. They had to really shift with the times and shift with how society and everything was changing.
It was in that meeting, I believe, that one of the ad reps just jotted down these two words – got milk. A few minutes later, put a question mark next to it and turned a grammatically incorrect statement into a grammatically incorrect question that became this whole big idea for an array of marketing activities and activations.
Mia Fileman 7:31
Yes, it’s so fascinating. I think they got to that insight because Goodby Silverstein who is the advertising agency – a world-renowned agency – have worked on campaigns for huge brands – Doritos, BMW, just massive brands. They actually put a hidden camera in the kitchen of their agency and were observing their own staff with the milk. It was there that they experienced the pain point – the deprivation of running out of milk.
Really, what’s so fascinating about this campaign is that it almost coined the term “deprivation marketing” which is that no one gives a flying ship about milk until you don’t have it. That’s a really powerful insight but also a very powerful human behaviour.
Laura Pickering 8:30
Creating a problem that people don’t know of or that they don’t know exists is one of the most powerful roots of a marketing campaign that works. They certainly tapped into that – 100 percent.
I love it as well because it responded to market changes. It was anchored in customer insight, but that insight – like you say – wasn’t a big, expensive market research project to validate the idea. They did do it because they had the money to do it, but it was based on observation, gut feel, and I think any marketer, or any business owner really should spend that time to observe people in their natural habitats and just watch. There’s a real power in observation as a market research tool.
Mia Fileman 9:22
And so, they came up with this very simple, grammatically incorrect slogan – “Got milk?” – which allowed the audience to really sit on that and become problem-aware. That’s just the beginning of the brilliance of this campaign, really. Right, Lauren?
This campaign took huge creative risks. They hired a director to film the first television commercial for the “Got Milk?” campaign. The director was almost a nobody. He was up and coming, but he was not as well-known as he is today.
He is Michael Bay who went on to direct Pearl Harbour, Armageddon, and a whole bunch of other blockbusters, but they plucked him out of – well, not obscurity, but he was not big yet – and they asked him to direct this television commercial and it was quirky as all get. It was so cooky.
It was in a dingy cellar room. There’s this very awkward guy who’s obsessed with American Civil War history. He’s about to win a competition. All he needs to do is answer the question. He knows this. However, he had just taken a bite out of a peanut butter and jam sandwich and went to take a swig out of the milk carton so that he could get that clinging feeling out of his mouth and the milk was empty.
He wasn’t able to answer the question on the radio. As a result, he lost this radio competition with this major prize. This was soul-crushing because this particular guy was born to answer this question. The plot is ridiculous, but it works. I have watched it recently and went, “That is genius.”
Laura Pickering 11:29
Yes, it’s a great ad. It’s funny. It didn’t hit the Australian market. It’s very American.
But – thanks to Hamilton – I am now watching this ad where the question was “Who shot Alexander Hamilton?” in the History of American Politics and Wartimes. I’m like, “It’s Aaron Burr! Damn it! It’s Aaron Burr!” With that peanut butter-filled mouth, he was like, “Aaron Burr,” and can’t get the answer out.
I guess that one creative started it, but that creative risk and that topic and that theme for an ad was so obscure, but it comes back to me for the reason for the campaign which is the source of frustration and the slogan which is “Got milk?” which makes such a really niche and quirky ad have longevity and weight.
Look, I’m sure you say it to all of your customers and your clients all the time, but if you target everybody, you’re targeting nobody. I’d argue that a category like milk, if anyone can target everybody, it’s a category like milk, but what they did with the “Got milk?” was give people the opportunity to relate it to their lives and their situation rather than telling you you’ve got no milk.
We’ve got one question mark and these many ways you could put the problem in front of people – be it an ad or be it licensing and collaborations which they did a lot of – it was over to people to take what they wanted from this iconic movement that was happening at the time.
Mia Fileman 13:11
Yes, and I want to talk about the licensing and collaborations because those are great, but something small businesses – actually, all businesses – should take out of this is that your big idea – the hero concept for your campaign – needs to be meaty enough to have that longevity.
Out of this one idea, they were able to roll out dozens of different creative executions, different scenarios. Some were really quirky – like, Aaron Burr somewhere a little bit more straight shooting – but you don’t want your campaign to be a one-hit wonder. You want several bites of the cherry because, as we talked about in our first episode, people don’t take action after seeing something once.
With this campaign, what they were really trying to do, the business objective was to generate milk sales, but really, when you dig below the surface, it was a behaviour change campaign. They needed people to stop drinking soft drink – which was very bad for them – and go back to reconsidering milk, and that takes a long time.
One campaign creative and one TVC is not going to get the job done. This really speaks to my love of campaigns. When you hit on gold, it can feed your audience for decades – like this one!
Laura Pickering 14:40
Yes, and come back again. It lasted for decades. Milk then shifted when the whole wellness industry started to pick up again to moving away from a point of frustration back to why milk is good for you, but more recently, it’s come back on TikTok with the “Got Milk?” challenge.
“Got Milk?” is tried and tested over time. That’s where the best of the best live. It must have been a huge decision and a big risk that they had moving away from this message of health and wellness to a humour-based point of frustration big idea, but the cracks of all marketing and all business comes into matching your product with your customers and making sure that you find that sweet spot.
They’ve highlighted that here. They didn’t create it. They highlighted it.
Mia Fileman 15:38
Totally.
Beyond the television commercials, what else was there? What were the other components of this campaign?
Laura Pickering 15:46
I think the most famous iteration and the thing that people would most likely remember – even in Australia, know of – is the milk moustache which is what you’ve tapped into with your cover art.
This launched in 1993. I believe it was in California – the California Milk Association. But then, the National Milk Association picks it up a few years later. They go wild with celebrities. We’re talking mid-90s here. We’re talking print advertising. We’re talking the white line on your lip – the milk moustache with “Got Milk?” taglines.
You’re talking about celebrities like Britney and Jennifer Aniston and David Beckham. You’re talking the who’s of the who. Harrison Ford. Mandy Moore.
Mia Fileman 16:39
I love Mandy Moore.
Laura Pickering 16:41
They went beyond humans. They went into characters with Superman. They even went to Kermit the Frog.
This quickly became not an advertising campaign but a cultural moment in time that still lasts today. You mentioned that it is one of the most parodied taglines of all time. If you’re on Saturday Night Live, you know that there’s something happening there. I think that that probably was the part that resonated. At that time, print and billboard, very much the “it and a bit” of branding and marketing.
I touched on this before, but the part that probably is overlooked in this campaign are the licensed products that were part of it and the collaborations. As milk as a category, you have obvious choices. They licensed the slogan – I think it was – to Oreo and there was a cereal.
Mia Fileman 17:35
Cheerio’s?
Laura Pickering 17:37
Yes, something like that, and that makes sense, right? Cereal, milk – tick. Cookies, milk – tick. But they went beyond that. There’s a “Got Milk?” Barbie out there with a cow print dress and a gift with purchase curly super straw. I love that they went a little off centre with their licensing and partnerships.
What rings true today about that is that collaboration marketing is where it’s at. That’s where you can really find new audiences, new messages, new associations, new markets really quickly, but it has to have a point of benefit for both brands. For milk, they don’t need to drive awareness of milk. They needed to change the perception of milk in some ways.
For Barbie – who I can speak to all day long with my history with Barbie – Barbie is a brand that has reflected culture and pop culture for 60-plus years, so they wanted to be part of this movement as well. You had this partnership license collaboration – whatever you want to call it. I don’t know the commercial deal, so I don’t know what the exact technical term would be, but they found all those avenues to again extend their campaign and just be in front of people in new and different ways.
Mia Fileman 19:00
That’s such a good point. I absolutely echo your thoughts about the power of collaboration marketing, but just like this campaign shows us, you need to go beyond the obvious.
Everyone collaborates the same way. “We’ll do a limited-edition product. We’ll do limited-edition packaging. We’ll do an event.” But if you can really do something attention-grabbing, then – guess what? – you’re going to get attention! I think now is a good time as any to repeat the creativities, the future of business advantage.
Laura Pickering 19:35
100 percent, yes, and it’s not just for products.
The people who have businesses that are anchored in product have collaboration opportunity coming out of their ears. But so do you if you are a service business. It’s just thinking a little bit deeper and finding those links that may not be obvious.
Right now, for instance, I work in education. We’re looking at partnering schools with industry and creating pathways in that space and cutting out the middleman of university. At the moment, I work in girls’ education. There’s a gap in girls’ engineering. Well, let’s get schools and industry to talk because, at university, a lot of girls drop out.
It is insight-based. There’s mutual benefit. It’s just finding the avenues and creativity and critical thinking.
Mia Fileman 20:22
That’s so great. How genius is that? I definitely want to know how that evolves. I’m so keen to follow that.
Laura Pickering 20:30
Yes, but it’s the collaboration marketing anchor to this thinking. If you’ve got that anchor point, and you talk about it, I know, in your schools. Once you are taught how you can do it, it’s really just figuring out the actual path that you’re going to take.
Between the TV and the print and outdoor and the collaboration marketing, that was really the crux of the “Got Milk?” campaign that went on for a decade.
Mia Fileman 20:55
Yes, awesome!
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We’re going to get to the results and actually see if it worked, but the last thing that I want to cover off about this is that it broke the rules.
Now, you and I, we are marketing rule followers, would you say? We are professionally educated, strategic marketers. We know all the rules. We tend to follow the rules. This one took the rulebook, set it on fire, and threw it out the window.
Laura Pickering 22:05
That’s the power of working with other people.
Sometimes, if you’re running your own business or working internally on a brand, you’ve got to get the lens and the views and the opinions of others. It wasn’t the milk industry who came up with this idea. It was their advertising agency partners.
When I’m in a creative meeting and something makes me feel a tad bit uncomfortable, I know that we’re onto something because, if I’m feeling completely comfortable, it’s too obvious.
Yes, you and I have a risk tolerance of about 10 to 15 percent naturally, so we need people to stretch us beyond. We talked about the grammatically incorrect, and I love the question mark because “Got Milk?” and the “Diamond is Forever” campaign are two of my favourites.
The “Diamond is Forever” campaign was De Beers back in the 1940s. The aim was to associate diamonds with everlasting love. Hence, a “Diamond is Forever” is born. If you put a question mark at the end of that, does it work? No. If you put a full stop at the end of “Got Milk,” does it work? No.
The power of copywriting is so underestimated. We don’t attribute a lot of marketing success to copywriters, and we really should.
Mia Fileman 23:34
100 percent agreed. Totally!
All right, Lauren. Did it work? Did it boost sales?
Laura Pickering 23:40
I’m a marketing purist, so I want to see campaigns like this work. I want to see them get with the investment and the response and the positivity and the PR noise. I want to see them get sales and have a long-term impact.
Dove Real Beauty comes to mind as a campaign that had this much impact and saw that the sales and the social awareness part come to fruition. For “Got Milk?” we know now – and they probably knew then – that milk consumption in the traditional sense was never going to get back to where it was before this entire soda industry came to fruition and took off.
Did it work in terms of pure sales? Well, in the year or two after the campaign, the gallons of milk sold in California went up. Great. But milk consumption of the next ten or so years went down. Sales went down, too.
I guess my question would be, did they maximise the opportunity to halt a trend that was already declining, and did they adjust that line? The data says, yes, they did. They stopped what could have been a 200-plus million-dollar decline and save that to be a 20-odd million-dollar decline.
Did they, however, find a way to create a new problem or a situation to grow consumption in lieu of the drinking milk that they were losing to soda? No, they didn’t find that opportunity.
That’s where I go back to the “Diamonds are Forever” campaign. Diamond associates with everlasting love. All of a sudden, bang! A diamond engagement ring is the product of choice and they’ve created a whole new market for themselves as a category product.
For me, it was never going to grow sales to the level, but – for this campaign – what would have happened? I can relate to that a little bit because, when I was at the helm of Barbie, the lovely movie “Frozen” comes out and, all of a sudden, every little girl wants an Elsa doll – not a Barbie doll. Barbie was in decline for a few years. Of course, she was because, when there’s switched behaviour, that happens.
But for my team’s actions at the team, what would have happened? Because we did everything that we possibly could to minimise that decline. Eventually, Frozen had its moment, and then Barbie got back on positive growth. It does raise the question “is advertising the only thing that can drive sales?” No, it’s not, and it shouldn’t be.
I think the answer to this question “did it work?” is yeah, nah – very Australian.
Mia Fileman 26:28
So many good points that you mentioned there that I think that it did work in terms of it slowed down the ultimate demise of milk which was inevitable. But the thing that I hear you say – which is the thing that I believe – is that we are not in the business of turd polishing. That’s not what marketing is.
At the end of the day, the best marketing campaign in the world can’t save a dinosaur industry. Customer behaviours and customer preferences have changed. I’m lactose intolerant. I can’t drink milk, and so do a lot of people. This was inevitable. I definitely don’t blame the marketing.
I will always hold this up as a marketing masterpiece. I think that it did the best job it could do but, at the end of the day, the four Ps of marketing – or the seven Ps of marketing – it’s more than just the promotional element. It’s the product. It’s the price. It’s the distribution strategies. It’s all of those things that come into play.
I feel like the problem with milk consumption was that, by the time they got to this campaign, it had already been too late. It was already a fuddy-duddy product.
Laura Pickering 27:48
Yes, I agree completely with you. It’s a campaign that has its iconic status because of so many things that were so right about it. It’s not only up to marketing and advertising to solve problems. It’s still an incredible campaign, but you have to be realistic about the trajectory that followed.
Mia Fileman 28:07
Exactly.
All right. What can small businesses take out of this? You mentioned clever copywriting is underutilised and under-potentialised. If you’ve got some budget, go and find a killer copywriter that’s going to help you nail that message.
Deprivation marketing is now alive and swinging. We see this across a lot of brands, but it really started with “Got Milk?” but there is something there to explore.
All marketing should be insight-driven, and all big ideas should be based on a human truth like no one thinks about milk until you run out. That is a human truth.
Anything else that smaller brands should take out of this?
Laura Pickering 28:58
Yes. I think, on the insight thing, it’s not expensive to gain market insight.
I think the other one right at the start that we talked about was don’t just roll over and repeat year on year the things that have worked for you in the past. Milk was doing that for about a decade while Pepsi and Coke came onboard and really took a big share.
I never like to focus too much on what competitors are doing because they’re them and you’re you, but you’ve got to keep an eye on them, so keep an eye on your competitors – not just your close competitors. What’s broadly happening in society at the moment?
To your point about the creative idea and that big idea, hold that at the core of everything you do when it comes to a campaign because, if you rush off and apply that big idea into tactics that don’t make sense for that big idea, then it’s not going to work. You have to stress test that big idea. Will it work in the many different ways you see it rolling out?
Mia Fileman 30:05
Yes, the example that comes to mind about an industry that has always done this a particular way is fast food industry. I have a food marketing background.
For forever, the way that you advertised fast food was with food porn. A burger that doesn’t look anything like the Whopper that you actually get – the sloppy, disgusting Whopper – but it looks incredible. There’s that crisp lettuce and this bun that actually has constitution as opposed to being this flat lifeless thing. That’s just what you did.
Burger King came out with the mouldy Whopper campaign, and everyone was like, “What have they done?” They have literally shown their product – not a competitor’s product – decomposing, looking foul, and that’s what they put in their advertising. It absolutely worked, right?
It won the Cannes Lion award for creativity, but it also really worked to send home the proof point that Burger King don’t use preservatives in their product. Taking a commonly held misconception, people believe it. They’re like, “Oh, well, it absolutely has preservatives.” “McDonald’s chicken nuggets don’t actually have any chicken in them.” Of course, they do! They’re supplied by Ingham Chicken. It’s totally chicken!
They just hit that right on the head with the mouldy Whopper.
Laura Pickering 31:34
Yes, and those two examples, talking about them in one episode – Got Milk and Burger King mouldy. There are nuances there in terms of people who are wanting to head down an anti-marketing or an anti-competitor angle, that’s where Burger King goes, and that’s just the relationship of Burger King and Macca’s and all of those fast-food giants.
But milk took it a slightly different way. They didn’t necessarily go anti-marketing or anti-competitor. They went with the deprivation angle. I think that could be much more appealing for businesses that had a smaller reach and a smaller opportunity to create tension and a smaller threshold for risk.
Mia Fileman 32:20
Totally.
I think the Burger King and the McDonald’s little tiff that they have only works in their benefit. It’s almost like they’ve gotten together, and they’ve said, “We are going to energise the category by doing this. This is going to be fun. We’re going to have these Twitter wars.
At the end of the day, there are days that you need a Whopper, and there are days that you need a chicken nugget. We are totally digressing here, but this is my podcast, so I’m going to do whatever the friggin’ hell I want.
This is a marketing rule that’s made famous by Byron Sharp in How Brands Grow. We think that Burger King has their customers and McDonald’s have their customers. That’s not true. There is massive overlap. The empirical evidence has shown that people who use and consume in the fast-food industry consume all the brands in the industry.
Laura Pickering 33:16
Of course, they do.
Mia Fileman 33:17
Of course, they do. There is no such thing as a Pepsi drinker and a Diet Coke. If you can’t get a Diet Coke, you’re going to get a Pepsi. That’s just what it is. I really liked that it looks risky – what they’re doing with the mouldy Whopper and the tiff – but, actually, there’s a lot of strategic marketing underpinning all of that, as you would imagine with two global fast-moving consumer brands.
Laura Pickering 33:40
Absolutely, yes.
Mia Fileman 33:42
All right. We could talk forever, so we’ll definitely have you back and we’ll pick another topic. Is there anything else that you would like to leave the listeners with?
Laura Pickering 33:51
I’m just so happy that “Got Milk?” is coming back into the vernacular with the TikTok era because there’s something classic about great ads, and I want my kids to know who Ketut and Rhonda are!
Mia Fileman 34:07
Oh, my god! Yes! Yes, so true!
Don’t worry. I have already shown my children Centre Stage. They’re obsessed. As soon as Layla is old enough, it’s A Walk to Remember. There are mandatory things that she needs to understand. James, too. We watched Grease the other day. Yes, it’s going to live on in marketers, I think.
Such a pleasure, Lauren. Thank you once again for sharing your wisdom bombs and your insight and your such-an-intelligent brain with the Got Marketing? Podcast.
Laura Pickering 34:45
Awesome. Thank you, Mia!
Mia Fileman 34:48
Thank you!
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