Milking It?

The lovely folk at Cybercom recently compiled a list of the Top 10 Key Digital Events of the last decade. They had a shortlist of 50, we thought we would explore one of our favourites.

Get The Glass - California Milk Board. The California Milk board was developed in 1993 to combat declining milk sales and has been at the top of its game since.
They appointed ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to come up with a campaign to transform people’s perception of milk from boring nutritional beverage to cool fun ‘brand’ capable of challenging the Pepsi’s and Sprite's out there. It was clear from the offset the ‘milk is good for you’ messaging wasn’t working so they employed similar tactics to the flashy lifestyle brands they were up against, using a lot of humor to develop a fresh take on the brand. They came up with Got Milk?, a campaign that crossed many reaches of popular culture and went on to become the most culturally influential tagline since the advent of broadcast television. So successful it was then licensed out to National Dairy Boards across the States and still has milk moustaches appearing on billboards 15 years later.

Over the years they have developed the brands online strategy, creating a fictional rock band called White Gold complete with myspace, youtube channel and website. More recently after branding milk as a ‘superdrink’ they created an online board game Get the Glass, featuring the Adachi family facing a terrible predicament- life without milk. The game is very playable and the animation superb, the perfect extension of the milk as a commodity message.

These guys really set the bench mark for a digital campaign and for a product that was as ‘unsexy’ as milk that is no mean feat. The Got Milk website is fantastic, it has recipes, great tips on recycling, and is full of fun mini-games to play all, animated beautifully.
Raise a glass of the white stuff to them.