Milk. It Does a Body Good
In the documentary “Art & Copy” (2009), among the many stories behind some of advertising’s most iconic campaigns, Jeff Goodby, co-chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners tells the somewhat disappointing genesis story of 1993’s “Got Milk?” slogan. Not to spoil the surprise, but it came to him when he wrote it on a whiteboard and everyone thought it was kind of lame and grammatically unsound. Ta-da.
I hate milk and to this day, will only drink it cut with coffee or cinnamon on my cereal. But Goodby’s “Got Milk?” story made me long for the milk campaign of my childhood. The one about milk making you awesome, the one that would come on after a Penny cartoon while you ate your Cheerios. Not the one about lubricating your fat facehole to fit more cake. Not the one where you’d be engrossed in a magazine with your parents mere yards away and suddenly the white junk on Daisy Fuentes’ upper lip would drop you unexpectedly back in the eye of your hormonal shitstorm.
The story goes: in 1982, after years of declining milk consumption as Pepsi and Coke took hold of America’s teenagers, diary farmers tasked McCann-Erickson with speaking to milk’s nutritional benefits. There were commercials where snot-nosed little girls were transformed into snot-nosed Nordic models, where scrawny little guys would grow into hunks in half-shirts. But it turns out this message didn’t really speak to kids and it just ended up making adults feel bad about themselves. Health and good abs? Yawn.
So a decade later, when it came time to rewrite the message, milk’s savior was an appeal to simple self-indulgence, to its implied greatness by virtue of its own existence, a message that in essence, could easily have been rephrased “Fuck you. It’s Milk.”
