Watch above or ready below.

Matthew Burns:
I dunno why I wrangle you back every single time. We were talking recently about a client who was looking for a new strategy for their updated service offering. And when we did this, we came up with all these ways to say this thing very quickly. It’s a billboard campaign, so it must be very quick, so eight words or fewer, and less is more. So we were jamming through words, and somebody said, “Got clogged?” Like it’s a drain clear offer, “Got clogged?” with a question mark, and then some fancy weird image. Right?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
For Seaside Plumbing, we’ve talked about them before on the podcast, and it’s weird because immediately all of us were like, oh yeah, like the old Got Milk campaign.

Stephen Semple:
It was an immediate recall for pretty much everybody in the room, both American and Canadian.

Matthew Burns:
My favorite part was that the client, because now we’re Canadian people and Canadian partners with the Wizard of Ads, this is an American client down in Maryland. They were like, ” Oh yeah, no, yeah, we know the Got Milk campaign. This is great. Oh my gosh, we’re going to do the Got Milk thing. We’re going to steal from Got Milk. This is great. Oh, they were so excited because they had a connection to Got Milk. So, arguably, it was a good campaign.

So we were like, let’s go highlight the Got Milk campaign, and a couple of other ads. So I’m going to play one right now, so then we can talk specifically about what they did here. And so take a look at this very old 1990 Got Milk video.

 

Mom: Drink your milk, kids.

Young Boy: I don’t want milk. Milk’s for babies.

Younger Girl: Yeah, babies.

Mom: Well, yeah? Well, I happen to know that milk helps build strong bones, so drink up.

Young Boy: Well, Mr. Miller told me he never drinks milk. Look at him.

Young Girl: Yeah.

Mr. Miller: Hey, kids! [Lifts wheelbarrows and his arms fall off. Moans.]

[Kids scream]

Mr. Miller: Whoa, that’s not good.

Narrator: Got milk?

Matthew Burns:
Poor man. And it’s funny, I remember these ads really well, but I didn’t remember the mom chugging the milk, which I thought was hilarious at the end of that ad. I’m not going to argue it’s the best dialogue. It’s not what we would write necessarily and how we would’ve approached it, but the actual entertainment value does hit.

And you said something to me very recently, which has really stuck with me. I actually have been saying it a lot more. We talk about the three pillars of domination, which are to be the loudest, the brightest, and to have the best offer. Okay, so this is something that I’m not taking credit for. This is something you said to me, and we were talking through something, and you said, I’m really leaning into this. And I said, great. Well, they hit two of these very well. They got loud, and they got bright. Can you help me understand how they did that?

Stephen Semple:
I actually think the most powerful part of the campaign was the billboards, which were just “Got Milk.” Not “Got Milk?” But “Got Milk.” Which is actually a question, even though it’s a period.

Matthew Burns:
Very fair. I actually didn’t find any of those. Maybe I’ll see if I can get one further.

Stephen Semple:
Because again, it’s a strong statement. It’s an unusual statement. The temptation would be to put it as a question, but make it “Got milk.” I’ve got milk. No, I don’t. And to me, those were actually the ones that were the most powerful. It was funny, I didn’t remember the television ads, but I can remember the billboards. Got milk, got milk, got milk.

Matthew Burns:
And I agree with you, and again, that could be the difference between Canada and the United States. I don’t know that for sure. We might’ve run more billboard campaign parts of this, but yeah.

Stephen Semple:
So the issue of the campaign was a decline in milk drinking. So basically, what they wanted to do was drive home this whole idea of drinking milk. Now what we know now is when you do factual campaigns, and they’re a really great book that covered, this was a case for creativity. Unfortunately, you can’t get the book anymore, but they talk about how information is almost like our minds fight information almost the way the body fights a virus. We build antibodies to it. We build counterarguments.

So one of the challenges is if you just said, oh, it’s going to make your bones stronger, it’s going to make your bones stronger, it’s going to make your bones stronger, we would ignore it. They managed to wrap it into a little bit of entertainment.

Matthew Burns:
Correct,

Stephen Semple:
And got the message out in that manner. They made it ridiculous and all these other things, but that’s fine. But it did move the needle for milk drinking.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely. It did. Actually, it inclined while they were running the ads; it inclined every single year, and they were constantly getting more and more people to drink.

Stephen Semple:
So they ran repetition, they used entertainment to get it, and then they basically just had this one message around stronger bones. I think it would’ve been stronger if they had layered in other health benefits, one benefit with each one of the ads, right?

Matthew Burns:
Correct.

Stephen Semple:
Do the stronger bones, do the vitamin A, do the whatever the other benefits are, I think would’ve made it stronger.

Matthew Burns:
Well, and remember, listen, it was a 20-year campaign. It started in California. This is the best part. It started with the California milk producers, and they were challenged with what are we going to do? What they all agreed to was to take 3 cents from every jug that was sold and put it into a fund. They got, I think, from doing that for the first year, their ad budget was somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 million. They were starting to rival car companies and drug companies in their budget for marketing. So I mean that, yeah, massive, massive growth.

Stephen Semple:
Big share of voice.

Matthew Burns:
Big share. And now let’s go back to what I originally said. So they needed to get loud.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Matthew Burns:
How do we get loud?

Stephen Semple:
The best way to get loud is through the mass media, folks.

Matthew Burns:
Mass media.

Stephen Semple:
And the reason why is that it is the most effective way to reach a large number of people, which is what makes you loud. And then they got bright. Let’s talk about bright. And the bright is the entertainment in the ads.

Matthew Burns:
Right? Well, and I may even argue. And the strength and the simplicity of the message. Very easy to understand and entertaining.

Stephen Semple:
That’s a very, very good point. The “Got Milk.” Anytime you can take something, and you can get your message wrapped into just a few words, it is always way more powerful. Correct. So the whole being able to wrap it in two words, got milk. It really has a lot of strength, and it’s an interesting statement. It’s presented in a different way, and you can do it on billboards, trade shows, and all this other stuff. Yeah. That’s how you get simplicity. Simplicity allows you to get bright.

Matthew Burns:
And now I want to also mention this is like a 20-something-year campaign. This campaign ran forever. They ran “Got milk?” for so long, which means it was working, and then it stopped working. And I want to argue this, please. This is not based on data. Don’t get in the comments and go, Matthew Burns, I did research, and there’s no way this is true. I’m telling you-

Stephen Semple:
I should get in the comments and say-

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, probably you’re maybe there now. But my feeling is they failed what you had originally said about offering alternatives to the one single message. So they ended up getting boring. So the repetition, unfortunately, which we believe in repetition, repetition matters, but we also know that you get ad fatigue. And once you get to ad fatigue, it’s really hard to recover from ad fatigue. And so I want to argue that I think that’s the case based on everything I know. And then milk obviously let people down with the health benefit side of it.

Anyway, I mean, this is something you had brought up to me, but I want to play another, we talked about bright and using entertainment. But there’s another thing that we really believe in, which is taking the familiar to the unfamiliar or the unfamiliar to the familiar, so that people can connect. And I think this ad did a pretty good job of it because back in the nineties, the whole superhero franchise was starting to really get noticed, and so they decided to lean into that as well. So take a look at this got milk ad.

 

 

Captain America: Okay. Who are you?

Milkman: The milkman.

Captain America: Do you have a sidekick?

Milkman: No.

Captain America: A nemesis.

Milkman: A what?

Captain America: A bad guy.

Milkman: I am a people person.

Captain America: Have you been fighting crime long?

Milkman: I don’t fight crime.

Thor: What do you fight?

Milkman: Weak bones. A never-ending supply of milk and chocolate milk.

Narrator: Want strong bones? The calcium in milk helps make your bones strong.

Matthew Burns:
I don’t understand why there’s a trap door at the front of the mansion for the superheroes. I don’t know. As soon as the doorbell rings, everybody gets interviewed when they get to the bottom. I’ve got question marks, people. But acknowledging that building strong bones is a superpower, I think it saved the day. The Got Milk campaign easily worked as far as getting into the brains of human beings. It was loud, and it was bright, and they tried to have a great offer, and then the great offer didn’t really pan out exactly the way they wanted it to.

What are some takeaways? What are the things that we can learn from this, Steve, that we should be applying to our marketing as business owners?

Stephen Semple:
I think there are a couple of reasons why. Also, I like the ” Got Milk? ” It’s closer to the language of the consumer.

Matthew Burns:
Correct?

Stephen Semple:
Right. Have we got milk? In going back to your beginning, one of the reasons why we, even with our client Seaside Plumbing went down the language that we went down is because we were going down, we were asking ourselves a question. How does the consumer describe this problem?

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. Oh, that’s right. Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
So got milk. Got milk? Is a statement that a consumer has milk? Did you get milk? Have we got milk? Right. It’s close to the language of the consumer, broken down into two really simple words. They did the unusual thing of having it as a period rather than a question mark, which makes it a statement rather than a question; at the same time, it can become a question. I think there are a lot of really cool things that they did in there that really gave it strength, and then they delivered a benefit statement.

I think the problem is that they should have had more benefit statements. It’s a meal replacement. There are lots of things that they could have done. They could have layered on so many. They could have even just, oh my God, it just makes my day. It’s just so refreshing. Again, benefits. They just got tired. It got tired of the one benefit statement.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. It’s funny. All of that said and done. I really wish they had joined forces with the cookie manufacturer coalition.

Stephen Semple:
Well, there you go. They could have done a co-branding with Oreo.

Matthew Burns:
They did actually do one. I didn’t highlight it, and maybe I’ll leave it at the end here, but they did one where Cookie Monster said, “Got milk.”

Stephen Semple:
See, there you go. The campaign got tired because it didn’t expand. And look, there are so many tentacles that they could have gone on that messaging.

Matthew Burns:
Okay, well, thank you. Awesome. I’m glad that we got inspired by what we’ve done for a client. Then it shows everybody that this isn’t just crap that we’re talking about over time. Thank you, my man. I appreciate you, and we will see everybody on the next episode of Sticky Sales Stories.

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