Advertising
What We Talk About When We Talk About “Milk”
Who needs mammals?
One of the most beloved and longest-running advertising campaigns in U.S. history made its debut 30 years ago with a short, conversational tagline: “Got milk?” The ads were notable for what they didn’t depict: no brand name, no product. Instead, the campaign, created for the California Milk Processor Board by San Francisco’s Goodby Silverstein & Partners, focused on what was missing: a cold, delicious glass of milk to wash down that peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich or that big chocolate-chip cookie.
To further tempt you, the ads brought in celebrities who posed with conspicuous milk mustaches below their noses: Harrison Ford, Britney Spears, Shaquille O’Neal, the Olsen twins, even Kermit the Frog.
The ads, which ran continuously from 1993 through 2014, were premised on the assumption that if you Got Milk you got it from the swollen udders of cows. Milk was, as one standard definition puts it, “an opaque white fluid rich in fat and protein, secreted by female mammals for the nourishment of their young.”
