Milk Mustache Database

Welcome to the Milk Mustache Database

My name is Joshua Patrick Dudley, and I have loved these ads since I was a child. I turned ten in November 1995. I later ran Milk Ad Collecting and Trading, a popular website devoted to the Milk Mustache campaign. I collected the ads, traded them, tracked where they appeared, and built lists of magazines, issues, versions, and other places collectors could find them.

I held onto my original collection for years, then made the mistake of throwing it away. I regretted it, and eventually set out to rebuild it from scratch. Using my old resources and location lists, I hunted down exact magazine issues, bought large lots of old magazines, searched eBay and similar sites, and slowly managed to recollect everything I had owned before, plus much more.

I came very close to completing the collection again. Then life hit hard, and I had to sell it to help pay my rent. I still miss it, and I still desperately want that physical collection back someday.

Until then, this website is my way of rebuilding it digitally and preserving as much of the Milk Mustache campaign as I can. I want this to be a place where the ads, their variants, publication history, contest material, promotional pieces, and other surviving campaign artifacts can be documented instead of disappearing.

This is a reference archive of milk advertising, with distinct sections for each documented campaign, international promotions, milk-mustache ads, contests, posters, merchandise, and spoofs or parodies. For each ad the aim is to write down who is in it, when it first ran, which magazines and issues carried it, who photographed it, what the copy says and which versions exist.

Nobody else kept this. The processors’ board that paid for the campaign never published a list of its own ads, the agency files are private, and the magazines that carried them have mostly been thrown away. Most of what survives is in collectors’ binders. The point of this site is to get that material written down in one place, with the sources, before it is gone.

If you have an image that is missing from this archive, or a clearer or more complete version of one already here, please let me know. The Missing ads page lists the ads I haven’t found images for yet. Magazine issue and page numbers are helpful, too. A scan of the actual page is best, at any size; a phone photo is enough to confirm where an ad ran. Contributors are credited on the record. Every recovered image helps put another piece of the collection back where it belongs. You can reach me through joshuadudley.com.